Project – Week 5
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It’s getting closer to the second playtesting session and the Beta, and I’ve continued working on character animation this week. It’s been a bit tougher this week though, especially with the task I’m currently working on: the main character’s death animation. In the game you can be shot down by guards if you’re spotted while sneaking around, and the player doesn’t have any HP so being shot equals death and game over. So the animation has to show (clearly) that the player has been hit and that it was fatal. The best and clearest way to do it is to have the player fall to the ground. But how do you do it? And even more important: how do you do it in top-down perspective? Since I had to draw new frames this time, I managed to save some different stages during the process. I first started out with roughly sketching out the general idea of what would happen in the animation, and used one still frame from the walk animation as a guide.
After that I began working on getting out the general shapes and colors, which is kind of the start of the sculpting part of the process. After this stage most of the work is about getting it all down and refining and defining the details and try to create as much flow as possible in the animation. This part has been troublesome this time though and has taken a lot more time than expected. The main reason why it has been difficult is the view/angle. To show someone falling is a bit tricky from the start, and in that perspective it gets a bit tougher. One good thing in this case though is that it’s a fast action and doesn’t therefore need a lot of frames to make it believable. Having more frames in an action like this can slow it down and also take away the force of the action. When I started out on the refining stage, I had about 5-6 frames for the action. This was changed later on to 4 frames, since it came out too smooth and slow with that many frames. Here’s an example of how it first looked like and how it looked afterwards: As you can see there’s some changes done between those two, and that’s the second reason that it’s been a difficult animation to work on: changes! The first animation test I did had a nice base, but it felt like symmetry wouldn’t work that well this time. Having the arms and legs move the same makes it look kind of flat and stiff, but so far I haven’t found a good solution to the problem yet. I’ve been experimenting some with different positions and movements for the arms and legs while working on this, but it doesn’t really come out that right. I think I maybe should try something different with the final pose, but I can’t seem to come up with an alternative right now. I think I’m going to leave this one for now and work on other tasks while I’m thinking about solutions to this problem. This is the current version of the animation but I’m rather sure that it will be changed later on. I’m going to talk with the other graphic artists in my group and see what they think about the problem. Hopefully I’ll manage to get at least this one done before next week.
I had one of Valdemar’s tiles from the game in the background while I was animating in order to get an idea of how it would look in the game. I thought it would be good to show what it looked like, so I kept it there for this .gif.  |
