A blog: Part 2 – Blog? Blog.
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5SD064 This week has been a busy one, the entire team was working really hard to make everything ready for the alpha playtest and the presentation. One of the things that i have been working on now that my alpha work was complete, is animations for the enemy characters. The enemy that has the most fleshed out graphics is the one we call the rifleman. He carries a rifle, and is the ranged enemy that the player encounters throughout the game. What animations does he need? Well he needs a death animation, a walk cycle animation, and a fire (attack) animation. These animations are what we decided are necessary for the beta stage, foregoing animations like an idle cycle etc. How did i do this animation, and what are those weird white wedge shapes on the character? Well those are the bones that are used by the unity program Anima2D, they are there to provide easy limb setup and movement. The bones also have the option to use Inverse Kinematics, which is why i use it. The Inverse Kinematics (or just IK’s) are points that provide bones with somewhat realistic bending. While the IK points are not being used in this attack animation, they are still useful for the actual movement animations. Another reason why we use Anima2D is because it makes the workload on us artists less heavy, because it means that we do not have to rely on frame by frame animation.
The character is actually split up in several parts, the upper body, backpack, legs and rifle. Each part has its own set of bones that control the contortion, or movement. When animating the character setting up each pose is easy to do by just moving the appropriate bones for each keyframe. The flame leaving the barrel is another sprite that also moves by each keyframe, that occurs after firing the gun. The frame disappears when the animation reaches the keyframe that disables the spriterenderer, and after that the rifleman returns to the start position so that the cycle can begin again. I would like to add as a final point, that the decision to separate the backpack from the main body to give it more movement was actually influenced by our graphics teacher.
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