Ray, Ray, Go Away. Come Again Some Other Day: Animating an Aether Ray
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This week, I’ve been working on the animations of the ‘Aether Ray.’ I devoted the majority of my time towards the basic movement of the attacking animation where the ray fires the projectile from last week at the player. This is partly because it was more complicated than I had originally anticipated, and partially because I wanted to make sure it was ‘right.’ The ‘skeleton,’ much like our own, is the foundation upon which everything else is laid upon. If I cannot make simple shapes and lines look alive, how could I hope to do the same for a fully fleshed-out sprite? For the aether ray, there were two options as to where it would fire a projectile and look plausible, the mouth or the tail/stinger. The group decided that the origin of the attack should be the tail, and that’s where I come in. In the beginning, my group was under the assumption that we would need an initial animation (or at the very least, an ‘attack’ and ‘dead’ state). So for alpha, I believed that four frames was ‘good enough.’ Idle, Windup, About to Attack, Attack.
However, once we got word that a static sprite was sufficient, I switched gears into working on what will hopefully become part of the final iteration. Firstly, the ray needed to be able to return to the idle state. Since it’s attack gave the appearance that there was a lot of power behind the wing motion, I carried to its logical conclusion and gave it a full backflip.
With the baseline in place, I began to refine it through the application of the Twelve Principles of Animation. The two main ones I applied in the process were the squash and stretch (the results of an action and reaction respectively) and anticipation ( The preparation of an action. Many a player has cried foul when this element has not been properly applied in video games). What I was trying to go for in the animation was that the aether ray put a little too much oomph in its attack and was trying to stop itself from spinning out of control.
Then came the tricky part. Part of the feedback I received Tuesday was to add an extra frame at the second to last part to better sell the idea of ‘screeching to a halt.’ However, when I did so, that one frame took out so much energy from the downward motion and crackback of the tails, which is something that I really liked about the older animation. I considered putting that extra frame into the upward motion of the tail so I could keep that power, but then I would be deviating from my original idea. Ultimately, I stayed the course, but even now I still don’t know if I made the right call.
All that’s left now is to put some meat on those bones, but this is what I’ve done so far. Bye for now, and take care.
Weekly comment: https://shirovfx.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/creating-an-unfogettable-ambient/#comment-5  |
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