First thing to do before I animate is to basically figure out
what exactly it is that I’ll be animating! Using my GDD, I can clearly see all
the moves that I’ll need to animate:
(Player)
- · Idle Pose
- · Jump Slam
- · Backwards Dodge
- · Spin and Throw
(Opponent)
- · Hit by Slam
- · Being Thrown
- · Dazed
- · Hit Ground After Throw
I’ve also just had an induction into the animation area of my
University. Here I learned about the Dragon software and animation apparatus
they have set-up. Unfortunately it didn’t seem like there were many times where
the room would be free, so I took this into account when finalising my decision
on how to animate my characters. I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot
since BA7, and I think the most efficient way will be to start it all within
Adobe Flash. Now I’ve learnt a lot more about the program and its new features
since I last used it I can create animations that will still be of a decent
quality. As much as I would have liked to have animated using traditional
methods, I think for the time-scale I have it would be much better to work in
Flash to produce good-quality animations in good time.
Beginning Animation:
To start with, I’ve drawn out my character in the position
he’d be standing in for the duration of the game. I figured the easiest pose to
start with would be the ‘Idle’ breathing pose. I want to exaggerate this quite
a lot, so I’m going to make the chest really puff out and have the arms squash
slightly. I’ve made and animated a skeleton to demonstrate this:
Animating this way lets me get the movement and timing down
quickly and easily before tracing over it with the body outline…:
…and then finally cleaning it up using the Line tool. The
Line tool is great because it allows for clean, precise curves and they’re easy
to bend and manipulate, making animation easy and very smooth. Obviously it
still takes a very long time to produce, but that’s the price tag that comes
with animation as a whole! With the Body, Arms and head all on their own
layers, I can easily move the different parts around without disrupting any
previous movement I made to another part. I found it easiest to work on the
body first and then move onto the arms and finally the head since the body is
basically the ‘parent’ of the other parts, so the arms and head will only move
as far as the body does. Once it’s all cleaned up it looks something like this:
For an animated version of this and all of the other poses,
check out the character reel in the submission folder!
This process is repeated for all of the different actions
that the player would perform, such as the jump:
I
also have a time-lapse video of myself animating one of the arms. You can find ‘armTimeLapse’
in the ‘Misc.’ folder in the ‘Body of Production’ section of the submission.
This process was sped up by over 1000 times, so you can
imagine how long it takes to get right!
Now, after I’d gotten all of the actions done for the
player’s character, I could move onto the Opponent’s animations. After mocking
up a quick villain-esque character…:
…I began to animate the various different poses using the
same techniques I’d used before. The difference with these over the player
character’s animations, however, was the fact that the characters needed to
interact with each other for these animations to work. Luckily, Flash makes it
easy to use existing animations and artwork as a guideline to work on top of.
Here’s
where I insert another time lapse video! Take a gander at ‘jumpTimeLapse’ and
see a process that took almost two hours in just 2 minutes!
Colour. This is honestly a part I was kind of dreading. It
seems like the most logical option here would be to just fill in the characters
with flat colour (see above), but I’d much rather add some sort of shading to
the characters. The only problem is, with so many frames of animation and
Flash’s method of colouring, this could take much longer than I could
anticipate. I think, this time around, I’m going to have to sacrifice the
shading for flat colour in favour of another little something…
