How difficult was Miguel to animate? I read somewhere that he is 6’9 and over 300 pounds haha what a beast. Were there any specific things to take note of when it came to animating him? It’s insane how through his movements he just exudes power and strength. Even the way he walks just makes him seem like a guy not to messed with. Did his frame hinder anything in animation that would not occur on the smaller models?
miguel was SUPER FUN i loved animating him!! i feel like a lot of 3D animation defaults to super skinny characters that are basically just tubes, so it's fun to work with a character that lets you design the shapes into something more graphic
we had to think a lot about how someone that big moved, but also how they carry themselves when just standing and talking. we referenced idris elba:
when a person has very well defined and built up chest muscles, their shoulders tend to be pulled forward. i did some posture tests early on to help out with finding a good slumped but still powerful, natural standing pose
a lot of tweaking had to be done too whenever he was doing any kind of dynamic action because of how defined his muscles are, extreme poses tended to get off model pretty quickly. here's an example with one of the shots that i animated, i tried to recreate what his model looked like without any shaping adjustments:
i wanna give a special shout out to eric de carolis, who animated a lot of fantastic miguel swagger, he really helped set the bar for how we should handle miguel's massive everything when walking. he animated this shot:
so, yes! there was a lot that went into finding his character through movement and it's always a challenge to animate subtleties on someone this big while still making them feel heavy
