Suit Em’ Up – Ben Bugger
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Hello! This week I’ve been working on one out of two pre-bosses of our game. His name is Ben Bugger. He is a large blue-ish bug who rolls around on his huge ball of crap trying to roll over you and smash you Indiana jones-style. He also squirts goo all over the place to slow you down, but the smart player will try to kite him in to the goo and slow him down instead. Here is how he look facing the screen (kind of like a spider-bug lol)…
On this character some concept art and some key frames had already been done by my team-mate Måns Löf, so to starting up this week’s job was much easier than earlier weeks, which is nice since we are behind on the graphics front (we will still make it, no problems, but it won’t be much time left to polish the graphical stuff). So first of I opened the key frames images in Illustartor so I could start out with the first and basic pose and frame. Using Illustrator is great as you work in vectors making resolution infinite and changing your shapes a whole lot easier. And for the next frame I just copy the moving part to a new layer and change it by a little and work my way through the rest of the frames. In this animation I aim for a total of 8 frames for the total loop, where the legs uses 4 frames twice and the head all of the frames for a single loop. This gives the illusion of him running and pushing his dearest crap-ball all hysterical and bug-like while his head looks like it tries to find Barney. When all frames are done I export my Illustrator file to Photoshop to draw the glowing part using an airbrush like brush. After that I create each frame by selecting which layers to show. The layers come and are directly imported from Illustrator making this step really easy and fast. After that I save each frame as a .png-file. I know I can render a video of the timeline making this step automatically for me, but for some reason the files often comes out corrupted, and when they don’t there are duplet’s in the folder on some frames (I know how to solve the duplets problem though. If I set each frames time to one whole second and choose one FPS in the render options each frame will be exported as individual .png’s) So using render video doesn’t really work for me. If you know why the files are corrupted or have any ideas of hove to solve the problem please write a comment and help me out!! Last of I make a sprite sheet using sprite-sheet-packer, which is a freeware making it ridiculous fast creating a complete sprite sheet and automatically creates a matching .txt file with coordinates for the programmers to use when the character is animated in the game. Well that’s all for this week, have a good one! -Ludwig Lindstål  |
