Made for my “3D Animation” class, probably my first fully fleshed out animation, based on one of my favorite games. I repurposed it as an opening for the Quake videos on my YouTube channel.

The set is actually a map I created, “Save the World”, a map with a whopping 2.5 stars on Quaddicted. Oh well. It provided a good set for this animation. I’ve always been proud of the hallways with the diagonal light fixtures. Hallway fights are fun because they’re so linear, they beg bold behavior. You have to have people pushing into gunfire or in this case, full on grenades.

The interesting thing about Quake is, being one of the first major 3D games, it was made in a pre-skeletal animation world, at least in games. Characters are animated pretty straight forwardly through a sequence of vertex positions for each point. What this means is even when ripping models perfectly from the game, we don’t have rigs or T-poses. I was able to finagle the human model enough to give it a T-pose and basic rig, but the Ogre is a much more complex, non-human creature. So, I used the original vertex animations! They’re translated into shape keys when importing Quake models to Blender. I wasn’t aware of relative shape keys at the time, so unfortunately this leads to some squashing and stretching as multiple shape keys are applied at once as I try and create the illusion of smooth animation out of frames meant for uninterpolated choppy animation.