Ambient Pressure: Swimming Animation, Diver
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This week I’ll be talking about my process in the making of the main character’s animation. First off, I did a very loose sketch of how the animation could look like, even before the base sprite was finished. This was to just feel if I could really pull off a swimming animation and to give myself some time to consider how to work with it. So, here is the first sketch which I worked from:
It only includes the basic, main frames. I knew I would have to add more frames to have it look smooth, and also put some more work into the dynamics of the flippers. I did not want it to be a super realistic swimming style, as long as it was obvious that the character was swimming. I am aware that the feet and legs are generally in a higher position compared to the head while diving, but I wanted the head to be the main focus and to really have the character looking forward. I decided to take the animation in small steps, since I knew it would be difficult for me to animate. I have never done it before so I needed to figure out the quickest way for me to do it. Since there is a lot of details included in the finished base sprite (which can be seen below), it would take quite a lot of time to draw each frame. This is when I thought of skeleton animation; where there is a base skeleton underneath, which is used to move the character around. I decided to use that as inspiration and did an extremely simplified version of the techique. Since I did not have a ”base skeleton” I just used the simple method of copy and paste, and redrew the parts that needed fixing. All frames were basically created out of this one:
The first step, to me, was to get the legs moving. I focused solely on the legs, excluding the movement of the flippers. This version would only include the main frames, and consists of only 6 frames. Which makes the legs movement a lot quicker than planned and not very smooth. Here is that result:
After that, I thought it was important to get a good look for the flippers. The previous version makes them look very stiff and it’s just not working. If I’m going to be honest, the flippers were probably what took me the longest to do, mainly because I had a lot of problem getting them to look natural. Eventually I ended up with this;
It’s still not smooth or in the speed it’s planned to, but it does look more natural. After this I started focusing on the arm’s movement and adding the light which will hang from the belt. The arm holding the pistol will eventually be completely removed, since it will be separate object moving along the cursor. After struggles, several extra frames and a lot of redrawing, I ended up with this:
This is the current finished version, but will possibly be worked on again before the final version of the game.  |
