Cassiopeia Art Spotlight

Hi, my name is Alex Lehmann and I’m the Senior Character Animator here at Riot Games. We received many questions about how we were animating our characters and so I thought it would be easier to show you than trying to explain it, actually. This is especially interesting since we’re working on Cassiopeia and she’s a very interesting character in the first place as she has no legs and has to be animated something between a human and a snake, so I was very excited animating her for our game. It all starts by creating a mesh of the character and then creating a rig for it, which an animator like me can then manipulate. I create multiple poses in the animation tool called Maya by taking one control at a time and moving it to where I need it. I do this for multiple steps along the timeline which you can see at the bottom. As you can see I’m rotating the camera around so I can see the character from all sides and I just place everything where I need it for one pose. This can often take minutes or even half an hour. If you really want to find a very good pose it can even take hours if you want to find the right one. We divide a second into 30 steps called frames which gives me enough detail to shape how a character’s moving within a second. After I’m done putting in the first few poses I can then start scrubbing through the timeline and get a feel for the motion. The computer takes every one of my poses and interpolates between them. Some of the poses I have to go into detail like fingers hair or even facial animation. And for some I focus on the body only. As you can see I do this now for multiple poses along the timeline and what you see here really quickly is a couple hours actually of work where I shape out certain poses until I like them. Since I want to see the animation now in real time, I create a play blast which is a movie that I can just play in Quicktime or movie player. To tell the computer how I want to interpolate between two poses I can use a tool called the graph editor which you see right now. It allows me to shape the interpolation between two key frames on the timeline – those are the red ticks. There are literally thousands of key frames on this character at the end of the animation and all of them need to be told how to interpolate from one to the other And again I’ll create a movie and I watch it; I create some more poses. And I start to shape out the animation just how I want it. If you create a pose between two poses, we often times call it a break-down. I just create another break-down here to shape how she actually goes from the first pose into the ground position so that it actually looks nice And again I go into graph editor actually manipulating the key frames, and I will create another play blast very soon So this process takes, as you can see, this is super speed, but it usually takes a couple of hours to go through it, create more poses, more break-downs. Refine the poses and go into the graph editor to make sure that the flow from one pose to the other is actually nice and appealing The end was especially challenging; we had to find a quick ending to go back into our base pose of the character, but I created a curve that I animated the tail along. For all the animators out there, this is an “FK” rig and so it was especially challenging to work with the tail. Here you see a final play blast of the animation; you see what came out of it and how she goes actually back into her base pose. And then I was happy enough to actually put it in game and try it out and this is how it looks in the game. I hope this gives you an idea how we create our animations for our game and how much fun it is to be an animator I hope you have fun playing League of Legends and especially our new character, Cassiopeia.