The steep learning curve of animation.

During the past three weeks of our ten week project, I took up the work to animate the main character of our game. I thought this would be good practice since I’ve been animating some before in Adobe flash, although nothing more complicated than stick figures.The previous experience in animating movement did help. But this time I needed not to animate a straw-thin character, I had to animate a body with some actual mass. I started off with animating the movements with stick figures, as I am most comfortable with it and in the end I actually got a few rough running animations. This however, proved to be more difficult as the style of running i made did not fit into the concept of the character, which is a gloomy and lost soul. And the animations which i had done all had happy skipping looking running.

This is when I started to think that this animation work would be really difficult, yet really fun. From this point on I started on making the animations with a body instead of sticks. This all went well, and I learned a lot of new things working with it even if the animations still had happy sprinting or just dull walking.

This is one of the first iterations of the walking/run cycle.

The animation with bodies was problematic, since our character is slightly facing the camera in game much like Castle Crashers. And I had no idea how to make a character from such a perspective, I was completely clueless. About ten different versions later I remembered what we had learned i n our previous 2D course. Boxes. By making a box with legs running, I could see how to make the animations look like I wanted.

This was my solution to figuring out how to make a running character from a turned perspective.

With this I could now start trying to make a proper character running. And after a few tries I actually managed to create something resembling our main character somewhat running.

This was my first somewhat successful attempt in the creation of a run cycle.

After my first finished rough, I started fiddling around trying to make it look better and smoother. This however did not work out as I got stuck on one thing and didn’t get any further at all. My group mate, Christoffer told me to try making only rough sketches instead of trying with clean lines. I tried and it worked wonders! I managed to make a proper walk cycle that i could give to Christoffer for the cleanup.

A new rough for my group mate to make a cleanup of.

All in all my work with this animation was really fun and I learned a lot even though it was really difficult. And the next time I’ll animate it will be a lot smoother. Artifact Done!