Animating all the objects!
|
Hello again all Magic Writer fans! So this week I have been working on animating the remaining objects that the wizard will throw. All the alive, dead and hot items as well as some polish on the cold items. I got some feedback on them during our graphic presentation so I might go in and tweak them a bit. It is however hard to check if your animations look good without testing them in the game. The objects moves pretty fast on the screen so the three key frames that I chose to use feels enough. It would look good with idle animations on all the objects in the bubbles but time constraints and technical solutions makes it unrealistic.
Here we have all the alive items. I have tried making the facial expressions stand out when they are being thrown. Then I use the classical cross eyes and S-mouth when they make impact. I got feedback that the arms out in the air on impact makes the character look happy, my thinking was that the physics would make the arms fly up when they hit a monster. We have yet to implement the third key frame, right now the object disappears when they reach their target. What I have done is mainly to stretch them and make it feel like physics is being applied, like tails and arms going downwards.
Here are all the dead objects. I am particularly happy with the vampire, making him into a bat when thrown and turning into mist on impact. I got some feedback that the cross does not really represent a dead object, and I might agree somewhat – however an upside down cross is a well-known symbol for the unholy. Here I have also drawn the arms straight out for impact, I will have to see how that look in the game before deciding on changing it.
The hot items were a bit harder to work on, making flames that physics are applied to with only a few key frames. We do however have a particle system in place that makes flames sprout from the items as they fly. I use the same principle here and just stretch the objects when they are being thrown, I noticed that exaggerating the stretch helped make it look good in-game. I also updated some of the cold objects, after discussing with lead art we decided to add some highlights to the icy items.
Cheers!  |
