Title: Lara Croft Jump Animation
Work: Hollywood Animation Academy
Application(s): Autodesk Maya 2024, Adobe Premiere
Created: Fall 2024 – Winter 2024

As our final game cinematic animation assignment, my mentors at Hollywood Animation Academy gave me a FBX model of Lara Croft, protagonist of the Tomb Raider series, as well as a set and a simple objective: get her to jump from the wing of the plane to the other side of the cliff. I was also given a bit of freedom to add some personal touches to the animation, so I made the plane unstable and had it fall near the end of the animation, with Lara breathing a sigh of relief that she wasn’t on it when it did. This assignment taught me quite a bit about body mechanics and troubleshooting texture issues – the texture maps for Lara were partially jumbled due to a confusing naming convention, and I was taught how to fix them in Maya. I was also taught how to adjust timing in post-animation editing software such as Premiere or CapCut so less edits needed to be made in-engine.