Wood Spirit – All Animations

I was hoping to be able to write about something a little different than animations this time, but another animation post it is.
Although animations are fun, other tasks would have been interesting as well. But do not fret all, there is a Death-animation in this post as well!

This time I was animating the final standard enemy, the Wood Spirit.
Previously I have animated each character one animation at a time, idle first and then going for each other animation one at a time. This resulted in a rather nice tempo, allowing to focus on each animation one by one. However I started to think that perhaps it resulted in me spending more time than i had to in total on all animations for an enemy. Since I didn’t have a very streamlined work process I lost a bit of time switching from task to task for each animation rather than to do all shadows at once for instance.

Also since it was wood that I was going to animate I managed to take a few “shortcuts” that saved quite a bit of time. Like all other animations I copied the face, or mask rather, from frame to frame to maintain a coherent appearance and proportions. However on these animations I copied and reused a bit more, like the arms and branches on the head, just making the process a little faster and easier. I don’t necessarily like animating like this since to me the animations tend to appear a bit more “alive” if you draw the frames from the bottom up. Then there will still be movement in the lines from all the tiny variations, giving a more vivid, although perhaps a bit less refined, impression.
But again, since this was a wood spirit made out of wood and bark it made sense that it could be a little bit more rigid than fire for example.

Then I pretty much followed my now slightly standard process, but applying it to all the wood animations sprites before going to the next step.
First was the sketch-step. Just drawing the animations through with basic lines, figuring out the gestures. I started with the idle animation and used one of these sketches as the base for the rest of the animations. Before I have used one of the finished idle sprites as a base when drawing the other animations, but I found that the rough sketch worked pretty much as good as the finished sprite did.

Then came the linearts. I used the concept sketches to make the first idle lineart, and once I was happy with that I used that as a reference to draw all the other lineart frames. As stated above I copied and reused the original frame’s head, branches and arms, just rotating the different rigid parts and filling in the gaps. Then drawing the remaining parts from frame to frame.

And lastly the color-stage. I started with basic flat colors on all frames, and then started building up the shadows, and finished the frames with highlights.

It did occur to me later that working this way was perhaps a bit risky. I should probably have made a single frame complete first with lineart and full coloration to see if everything worked as well as I wanted. If anything had to be changed in the lineart for example once all linearts had been drawn, it could have taken quite a bit of extra time.

Overall I found this animation-process quite a bit faster than how I animated from the start, saving several hours over the entire enemy. This could however also in part be attributed to that I have been animating for a while now, decreasing the time required for each animation.
However, as a side-note, it was a bit more taxing than my previous process. The bulk of all frames made the progression between steps seem a lot slower, making it apparent that it was a faster method first towards the end when everything started coming together with a finished look.

Anyway, below is a loop of all the Wood Spirits animations (yes, including the death animation as well), hope you like it!

Loop of all the Wood Spirits animations.