Flying Monk Melee

As always I had a ton of fun making this animation. And as usual in my personal projects, I tried out a few different animation techniques I haven’t done before to challenge myself. This time around it was incorporating more 2D animation, as well as adding smear frames in the particularly fast parts of the animation.

The monk, Ping, was animated in Maya, and alembic cached into Cinema 4D for rendering. There, I animated the camera movements, applied Ping’s texture only in the illumination channel, and added the slightest ambient occlusion to obtain a mostly 2D effect. The rest was done in After Effects and Photoshop. The smears were painted right over existing rendered pngs, and all other assets are 2D art made and animated in After Effects.

This one was a lot less narrative driven than most of my previous animations. I really just wanted to focus on the action here, and I researched kung-fu until I was certain the movements would look authentic.