After rigging was done, it was finally time for animation the part I had been waiting for eagerly. I had my shots planned, including what actions I wanted, which dialogues were needed, and the camera angles I would use. I started looking for references for fighting scenes, and for dialogue and normal body movement scenes, I recorded myself to use as reference.
Before starting the animation, I changed a few shots. I had around 30 different shots to animate, from the animator sleeping to the two characters clashing, and I was panicking since animating characters properly takes a lot of time, especially with three characters. I started animating day and night, focusing only on the animation and ignoring environment work.
A lot of issues came up with my rig. Sometimes the hands or feet would come out of the gloves or shoes if I bent them too much, so I had to go back and forth between fixing the rig and reloading references. Slowly but surely, I fixed these issues and kept animating. It took me almost two months to complete all the animations as polished as I could while keeping the submission deadline in mind.
I got feedback from Ting, George and peers, and implemented as many changes as I could. For the scenes with swords, I had to use locators to make the swords follow the wrists, but this was not supported in Unreal. Since I was planning to render in Unreal, I decided to use Alembic caches to transfer the animation files.