Main Character – Death Animation

As expected, another animation! Another Death animation even, this time for the main character of our project.
Hmm, three out of four posts related to animation contain death.. A bit of a fixation perhaps?

Nah, not really. They just happened to be my latest finished artefacts of the project. But unless I’ve just finished the death animation for the boss next time, that post should be about something slightly different.

So, what can i say about this one that hasn’t already been said about the others? Well, this one was perhaps a bit more mood driven than the others. Since it belongs to the main character, and thus the player, it should probably have a slightly bigger impact than that of the standard enemy. Although they too, if you stay and look at them, have a little bit of anguish in their death animations.

The first thing I though when I drew the animation was that it has to fit in with the gloomy atmosphere that we are trying to create. The character consists of a dark, spirit-like body and a pale mask, so the idea I went with for the death animation was that the body wouldn’t be able to keep itself together anymore from the stress of the enemies attacks and “blow out” like a candle in the wind.
The mask however wouldn’t be affected by this, but remain suspended in the air, and simply fall to the ground once the body had vanished. All that would remain of the character would be the still, inanimate mask.

The process with this animation was largely the same as I have previously written about. The only real difference was that on this one after the characters body had disappeared, all I did was to copy the mask to the different frames and rotate and move it to make the falling effect.

Note the “easing out” effect on the mask as it begins to fall, if you aren’t very used to animation. The increasing distance that the mask travels each frame makes it look like it’s accelerating. Effects like this are very common, virtually universal, and something that you should think about if you attempt animating something.

I do believe that I could have done this effect a little bit better on this animation though. The initial easing out effect is rather sudden and not as readable as I would like. Similarly the fall overall is rather quick, and moving the mask too much between frames almost makes it look like it’s jumping from position to position rather than falling.
I believe adding a couple of extra frames for the falling mask could fix both of these issues, and in addition make the animation seem a little slower overall, making the gloom shine truer.

And although I think that the blowing out effect of the body turned out rather well, flowing and disappearing pretty much as I had intended, there are a couple of fragments that would perhaps need to be animated for an extra frame so that they don’t disappear so suddenly.

Although I intend to fix these details if there is time towards the end of the project, they are not very major details as (hopefully) the player won’t be dying all too often.

The Main Characters Death Animation