Week 7 Gardener Animations
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Week 7. This week I worked on the Gardener animations. As always I was using Flash to animate these. The color is a bit off in the gif’s so they will not represent the final product.
Walking animation:
The walking animation was the easier one of the animations that I did as it would only require some animation of the feet because of it being in top-down view. The process of making this animation: 1. First I laid down a rough sketch of the gardener. Sadly I do not have any pictures for this. 2. As I got the design approved I started roughing out the animation in the outlines
3. When the outline was done cleanly I started to fill in the character with color. This is the easy stage of the process as it is just kindergarden level of draw inside the lines.
4. Now that everything has been colored and shaded I export my work from Flash to Photoshop. I begin to make the Sprite atlas for the gardener. This is for the programmers. If you make a single sprite atlas instead of a sprite sheet for every animation it will reduce the drawcalls for the game resulting in less lag.
When I measure up the sprite atlas grid I use the Guides by layout function in Photoshop. (found at view > new guide layout…) I put in the number 128 px in the column section and how many columns there should be. In this case the largest animation consists of 11 frames. Then i do the same for rows. But I only need 5 rows instead of eleven. This makes sure that everything lines up neatly. If something is out of line it will cause the sprite to jitter. Now that everything is lined up correctly I give it to the programmers to test. Thankfully everything worked as intended and I did not need to make any adjustments Catching animation: (should not be looped.)
The same process here as the one above. First do a rough sketch and then make it clean and color it.
This animation provided a real challenge as it would require the animation to go vertically. This is especially hard to do in a top-down view as I do not have any depth to work with I need to create the illusion of depth. I do not think I succeeded perfectly but it will have to do as I am very pressed on time. If I get the time I will go trough it again but as we tried it in the game it got the message through and that is the main point of the animation.
Filling hole with water:(should not be looped)
The main animation was that the gardener would walk up to a hole and then throw his/hers catching net in front of him/her and then pull out a bucket and fill the mole tunnel with water. We agreed that the bucket would appear magically from his/hers pocket. This animation was done exactly like every other animation. First in Flash then imported to Photoshop. Thanks for your time!  |
