Hello there! Here is my personal God of War Valkyrie plus reel. They are mostly playblasts which is how I saw the character for most of the project (as Gunnr) since the bulk of her anims were finished before they were even tested in-game—which isn’t really the normal way of working in development. Things just unfolded this way because everyone was so busy that, Valkyrie was put in the back burner—and I flew by under the radar working on her for months without a regular review. (I quite liked it actually) Being an introvert, you just want to sit and get lost in your work without interruptions. At one point, there was no combat designer attached to her, so I was really on my own---interpreting every anim move from the early design document. I tried to include as much hand-key elements as possible in this reel. To be honest, I don’t really know how to look at motion capture animation reels. The Kratos scenes were mostly hand-keyed except for the short bit when he’s grabbing Atreus to shield him from the wind. I worked very clean. I have a bad habit of that. All Valkyrie's wing anims were animated by hand and mostly first-pass. It was like animating a 2nd character which made the process much slower. In fact, at one point, they had scheduled to outsource the wing animations, and I was very ’no-way’ about it. How do you outsource the very element that makes the Valkyrie unique? I performed her motion capture myself, mostly for the walks, and hit reactions and some recovery anims. I tried to channel Eva Green for her walk after having watched so many Penny Dreadful episodes. Can you see it? Maybe it's just me. She barely walks in the game, though. The two attack anims at 00:25 the spinning scythe attack and the wing stab right after---were performed by the stunt actress Thekla. She's on youtube somewhere! Mocap data still needed to be amped up quite a bit to sell the idea for gameplay purposes. Trying to act out the attacks to gameplay’s fast timing could really hurt your body. I have my own share of physical injuries. Trust me it’s not worth it. Leave it to the professionals. -_-' Denny Yeh, our combat designer, was reassigned to work on her and stitched together all the anims so well that they flowed nicely---and created unique attack patterns for them, too. And the directors/designer/leads got to see her play as a whole, rather than reviewing every individual anim separately. Anyhoo! Thanks so much for stopping by! Hope you enjoyed watching as much as I enjoyed making. Music by Bear Mcreary. **I do not own the rights to the music** Thanks to SunhiLegend (Twitter) for the great Valkyrie thumbnail.
