Falcon Animation
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Hi guys! So this week has been a really unproductive one for me. Mainly due to personal reasons but also due to some really bad planning and prioritizing. My tasks this week was to animate four different assets. Unfortunately, I have only finished one assets animation and started on another one. In this post I will talk about the one I have started, but not finished. So this week I were supposed to do the idle flight animation. I went in to this task excepting roundabout eight hours of work. I have put down almost 11 hours and I am nowhere near being done. This due to the fact that I did not realize how hard it would be to animate the wings flapping. I am animating in Adobe Animate (previously called Flash) because I have worked with that software before. I have also done an animation close to this one, but it was a long time ago and I do not remember how I did it. So basically the entire bird is built out of five different pieces. The head, body, leg and the two wings. This to allow me to move and animate all of them separate from one another. So far so good. But once it was time to animate the wings I started to struggle. My first naïve idea was to only have two keyframes and put a shape tween in between them. This lazy way proved to not be suitable at all. The end result from that was this:
So even though I tried to make some more adjustments in the shape tween it did not work. So at this point I declared war with Adobe Animate and decided to move on in life and start using Toon Boom Harmony instead. That software is far better than Animate and 1000 times better than animating in Photoshop. But after staying awake until 3 AM desperately trying to learn how to use it, I realized that it was taking to long. So I went back to Animate. And I am still trying to figure out how to make it bend properly. I have a strong disliking for frame by frame animation, but I had to compromise a bit. So now I am trying to draw out 5 out of the 10 needed frames and using a shape tween in between them. I also removed some of the details to make the animation easier. The biggest realization I have reached this week is that I need to learn Toon Boom Harmony. It seems to be such a great tool to animate with. But I do not have time to learn it and implement it in this project. Anyways, stay tuned and come back next week to (hopefully) see my complete animation.  |
This is the falcon. The falcon is an enemy which enters the screen from the left, flies straight ahead until the player is within reach. Once the player is within reach it attacks the player by moving towards it in a 45-degree angle.