MERMAID RIVER BLOG #2 – Full Throttle
Hello out there,This week sure passed by like a wind. We have started preparing for alpha presentation and members of Team 4 have gone full throttle! A few days ago we presented to our class a game filled with a pitch black screen and a color-changing cube, raving its way through the screen. Due to last week’s planning we couldn’t show any of our art and objects which was a let down, but things change quite fast in our group! We now have a representable alfa to show thanks to us working ourselves, this week, to the bone. The past days I’ve been working and sketching on more lineart and a background for our game ”Mermaid River”. Our programmers are still working out them panoramics, so our level design is at an early alpha stage (see Figure 1.1). Swordfish, our first enemy has finally come to life and is now finished in addition to Skip. Since our background is not finished yet I’ve decided to write about my little fish, for starters it was my first time ever drawing a creature from the sea and second, it’s already done! Just like last time, I’ve never drawn a fish before besides those consisting of one circle and triangle, not since daycare to be more precise. I went straight to the net to find myself some reference of a swordsfish from all sorts of angles. It’s very important to study, be prepared and draw what you see; otherwise spectators probably will find it uninteresting to look at! Plus it’s a good way to learn new ways of designing and fantazising; widen your horizon for all different kinds of art! But first enemy number one had to undergo some sketching before he ended up as a finished concept (see Figure 1.2) just to feel comfortable linearting him later, and boy does he look ugly! 
Figure 1.2, Early concept of Swordfish As always it’s important to think about line weights! To give your object a feeling of volume! To give different materials different thickness! Spending hours and hours of drawing line after line, them past weeks, really gave me lots of practice to gain the ability to draw quick and precise, which was pitch perfect for my assignment (see Figure 1.3); linearting our animation base. Since I was linearting and animating last week, it wasn’t that difficult to go the walk all over again. Although I had to keep myself in check so that every frame connected made sense, frame to frame. If someone takes a cold beverage, naturally you would expect that person to open and drink it, no? Also I exaggerated all frames a tiny bit to boost our art style and give it a cartoony look, even a little bit of personality. DIFFICULTIESIn the end Photoshop really isn’t ideal for animation. It’s slow and made my computer crash several times, sometimes I couldn’t even draw a single line! But a fellow student told me yesterday that Adobe actually has remunerated themselves by releasing a new animation software, right after I was done with Skip and Swordfish. I will probably give it a try as I’m open to new things! Well, now that we have learnt how Photoshop’s timeline works, I probably will stick to my old ways till this project is over and time’s on my side to learn new applications, when full throttle isn’t necessary!
See you next week! Thank you for reading my blog! =)  |
