GA - Development - Manual Animation

When I received animations from Simon, I asked to duplicate the same animation where 'Riven' offers the amulet to 'Fakiki'. On the duplicate there was to be no amulet and I would animated the section where it hovers out of his hand and over to the cauldron, with the camera and the amulet being so small; guessing where to animate it would of been impossible.

Now annoyingly for me, when I animated the amulet flying out of Rivens hand I couldn't see the hero animation happening at the same time. So instead I used trial an error to figure out the right times by running the scene over and over and getting closer each time. Eventually after a few tries I did, I parented a couple of lights with the amulet to give a small amount of dynamic lighting ensure it would stand out in a nice golden colour.

I then added a few tilts backwards and forwards to make the hovering more believable and the first shot was done! I also found that panning my camera slightly up in the shot also helped with the hover look.

Second Shot

This time with an birds eye shot panning over the cauldron, the amulet was to float right over the centre and drop in. Again I could only see one animation happening at a time, but using the key frames to know how long my camera animation took made it simple to figure out where my amulet needed to be animated, a few trial and error settings and then adding some extra tilt and roll to the object, a light to follow and it was sound. 

I also wanted the amulet to glow and the quickest way I knew how was with the image effects, however it has to be applied to a camera as it is a full screen effect. To get around this I just turned down the alpha channel in the mesh main colour on any object I didn't want to glow (everything in view except the amulet).