Cleaning up a design and working with layered animations

Hello again, everyone.

This week has been similar to the last, my work has been quite spread out and I’ve been working on both our player fish’s final design, and some misc. background assets. Given how extensive my first two blog posts were regarding my animation process, I don’t have anything too revolutionary to go through today. Nevertheless, I thought I’d once again go through a part of my process of creating an animation, as well as going back and touching on some woes I had in last week’s blog post.

If you read last week’s blog post, you would know I was a little displeased with the design I made for our player’s final stage of growth. Since my sprint planning this week included starting on this stage’s idle and movement animation, I had the opportunity to address the issues I had with the design last week.

Given the sketchy nature of the general design I created last week, some changes were expected when doing a cleanup. When I flipped last week’s design horizontally, I noticed the sketch’s anatomy felt a little off. I’m not the best at explaining this theoretically, but the placement of the eye and general shape of the mouth area made the design feel… Blocky and unbalanced. Given the general rounded and cartoony art style of the fish’s previous designs, I wanted to address these issues in the cleanup.

I’m stopping for a minute here to bring up something a little off-topic. I always draw my final sprites facing right, but when I draw the initial designs I always draw them facing left. This is deliberate, as I’ve noticed that in general when I flip a picture, it’s not uncommon that some components feel unbalanced when viewed from this new angle. When I draw normally, I tend to flip my sketches several times to make sure I avoid any big instances of this happening, and for designing my characters for this project I’ve deliberately drawn the designs the opposite way from the sprites so I can address any imbalance in my clean-ups.

Now, for the changes I’ve addressed when finalizing my stage 3 design… First, I’ve made the mouth area much rounder and made the mouth itself take up almost exactly half of the area. This is to address that imbalance I’ve been talking about. In the original sketch, the mouth area was a little bigger in general, but the mouth itself took up a little less space proportionally. I made this area rounder to go again go with the aesthetic style of the fish’s previous forms, and I made the mouth take up closer to 1/2 the area to, again address the imbalance.

I’ve also made the eye larger despite my wanting to make the eye smaller as the fish grows. I decided the dead stare in the eye was enough to convey the feeling I wanted, and since the previous two forms had quite big eyes, it would be better to keep that consistent rather than suddenly drastically change the size of the eye proportionally. I also moved the eye up a bit to decrease the amount of empty space in the design, and make it so the details on the character are spread out a little more evenly.

There are a some more noticeable changes, like my making the fins bigger and the fishing rod a little longer. These changes were again to keep things consistent from the last stage of the fish’s growth, but they weren’t as major or had as much thought put into them as the rest of the changes.

Finally, I’ve saturated the colors of the fish. In the last blog post I was really displeased with my color choices for this design, but in the end I decided to keep to the general hues and instead just saturated them for consistency from the last form.

In the end, I think I’ve done a decent job keeping the changes in the fish’s growth distinct but consistent.

This next section will be a little shorter, but I wanted to talk about something I’ve brought up a couple of times in my previous animation posts.

This week I created the idle and movement animations for this last fish. As you can see, they aren’t anything terrible impressive, and the movement animation is still unfinished as I haven’t had time to add the light bulb yet.

Still when you look at these two animations you can notice something very clearly that I’ve brought up before: I’ve reused the body for both animations, and in fact haven’t animated it at all. This is to save time so I don’t have to reanimate the same part over and over, and to keep consistency in my animations. I’ve worked like this while animating the previous two forms as well, and this process has been incredibly easy since I’ve split up all my animations into several different parts.

I’ve mentioned before how animating one part of a character at a time makes things much easier, and while I’ve only reused these body parts this extensively for these idle and movement animations, I’ve kept the same principle in mind while working on the rest of my animations. Here’s an example from the fish’s previous form:

This is only the first layer of the second form’s eating animation, and this was exactly how I started out working on it. I animated only the body so I could keep the general shape of the fish consistent without having to worry about any other details of the fish. After finishing the movement of the body, I went back and animated each body part one by one in the same way.

Keeping separate parts of your character layered like this makes working with more complicated designs much easier. Plus, if you ever decide you want to go back and reuse a particular part from another animation to save on time, it’s just a matter of duplicating the layer!

That’s all for now. See you next week, blog.