Further Development of the Spider Animation
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This week I continued to work on the spider animations frames. I did finish the walking animations of the spider, as well as finish the attack animation. The spider walking animation itself took around 28 hours of work time during the week prior to this one. I have already mentioned this in the blog “The Frustrating Spider Animation” in terms of why the process was so long. In short, I didn’t know how the legs of the spider moved in terms of a top down perspective. However for the Spider attack animation, it only took around 4-6 hours to make. The reason for this is because I used the frames from the walking animation on the attack animation. I didn’t need to draw any new leg frames as well as other body part frames from the walking animation, such as the eye movements. I only needed to do some minor edits to the frames such as moving legs from the original points in the older frames to make the attack animation. A point to note about both of the animations is that the walking animation uses 6 frames, while the attack animation used 12. I didn’t feel to need to create extra frames for the walking animation since there weren’t any details that needed to stand out from the spider. The only problem with this however is that if the spider walks very slowly towards the player, the frames would stand out. While I consider it as a problem, it is also worth considering that the slow walk would also looks more creepy since the walk itself looks off. This will have to be experimented once all the spider’s animations are properly implemented into the game.  I made 12 frames for the Attack animation because I felt that it would make it properly get the right kind of movement in the animation. What I aimed with the attack animation was to make the spider have a small charge up before it thrusts towards the player. I did this to create a feeling that the spider is about to do a powerful and lethal strike. This also gives the player a anticipation window to help them know when the spider is about to attack. A problem I encountered during this week is when I tried to color the frames for both of the animations. When I did the animations previously I didn’t use any color but rather the outlines. I did this because I didn’t want to go through the trouble of redrawing frames if they didn’t look good. Also my thought process was that when I finished the animations with the line art, I could just fill them in easily since I didn’t need to figure where the legs needed to be and so forth. I didn’t color in every single frame for the body but rather borrow the assets from the colored spider concept, like it’s eyes. It’s a very similar to a process that I mentioned earlier where I just use the frames from the walking animation and use them for the attacking one. The only thing I did need to color in however were the legs, since I the colored spider concept didn’t have all the leg frames colored in. 
I did this in a very tedious way since I had to copy and paste the colored frames over and over to get the exact location where the line art frames were. This was a very slow process and it didn’t help that the program that I used, “Krita”, wasn’t very cooperative during the entire process. Eventually I did get them done, even thought I could have probably done it in a more efficient way. Perhaps I should have used the colored frames from the beginning rather than the line art frames. I maybe could have saved more time in the long run. Anyway I’m pretty happy with the animations I have created. I feel that I’ve conveyed the spider in a good way to feel like a threat to the player. I just hope that I can be faster on the next enemies that I design and animate. The beta is due in 2 weeks or so, which is very close to the time I’ve spent animating this spider. I personally feel that the spider is one of the harder enemies to animate, so perhaps the next enemies I work on will be a lot easier.    |