Working on Otto’s animations.
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This post will be about how I went about creating the animations for Otto’s movement. At first when I began drawing these animations we hadn’t had our lecture in animations yet, you could say that it was a frustrating and time consuming task at the time. I fumbled my way through frames and in the end I had about 30-40 frames for a simple walk cycle. After the lecture on animation I had a breakthrough in my thinking around animation I learned to plan ahead in my work.
So this is how I went about planning the walk cycle from the front. At first I defined the floor by drawing a thick line at the bottom, then a smaller line above defined the hip. I then started by drawing the first movement as if beginning from a standing pose. From there I planned the rest of the movement, I decided to have 10 frames. The lines above the heads of the character describes how the torso and hands were supposed t move. When it’s a high line the torso moves up as the character reaches the apex of the step. A low line describes how the torso move down as the step connects to the ground again. Then as I drew the actual animation I crossed out which frames I had completed as to not lose track.
This is what the finished product looks like. I started out with a static picture of the character from a front view, I separated the legs and arms from the torso and put the in a folder named Frame1. I colored each part inside the folder and names them so that I could keep track of them as I animated. I then moved and redrew the parts that I had moved. When I was happy with the frame I copied the entire folder and named the new one Frame2. When I felt that I was happy with all the frames I put them into a spritesheet as shown above. When I have all animation for this character I plan on putting them all into the same spritesheet in order to simplify things later on. What I found out doing this work was that planning your animation before you spring into action animating is very important. Without planning the animation it will end up looking improvised and stale. With the animation planned you get a better look at your animation and thought progress. You can easily refer to you plan if you ever get lost or confused. Planning is key.  |
