Piranha Animation
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This blog-post is a reflection upon my Piranha animation, work method and design choices. My initial reference when starting to create a concept for my piranha was the piranha in the comic book Ernie.
Kind of cute but has more teeth than face. I felt this should do nicely since the group has been talking about how they drew correlations between our project and Happy Tree Friends, Worms and Finding Nemo. We decided on colored lineart and a simple range of colors, all enemies of the main character could be any warm color but yellow, since the main character uses that color. To get the cartoon feel of Worms(the game) I tried using a bit of squash and stretch to make the animation feel fluent and alive. I recycled the animation when the tail returns to the original keyframe state both to save time, and also I taught it looks good as is. Idle/Swim Animation I focused mainly on the lineart and proportions to give the feeling of the tailfin coming towards you, when it’s closer to you: thicker, and when it’s further away: thinner. I found that the easiest way to achieve this was by using keyframes.
To further imply the distance to the tailfin I tried making the lines extrude around the belly and spine when the tailfin passed them.
I also tried to keeping most of the frames at the far end of the animation when it “slows down” making the “whip”from side to side feel faster. The jawline follows the same principal, but I kept the bottom lip on the far end to give it a more 3D feel. To save time I intentionally made a sloppy job on the lighting since when testing it in game you really could not see the difference between well lit and “sloppily” made since the character is pretty small on the screen.
Attack Animation On the attack animation I recycled the tail animation and focused on the squash and stretch of the jaw. To further imply that it bites down hard I added that it closes its eyes when chomping down. And then I recycled the animation from the idle state when it turns back, licking its upper lip. Death Animation This is when Happy Tree Friends comes in. I wanted the death animation to kind of surprise you with some excessive squash and stretch, making the character blow up like a balloon. I have started preparing a texture sheet of different body parts, eyes and fins, which I intend to use with the particle system Unity to make the death animation explode in a cloud of cute gore. The Animation Idle/Bite/Death
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