Blogpost III – Fancy Mansion

Animating the Equipped Armour

This week I have assigned myself the task to animate the armor while equipped, or worn, by the protagonist. Since I have not done that many animations before this was quite a high risk task. But I decided to try anyway since we have a lot of work to do and be done with until the Beta. To make it seem like less work I assigned me the side (right an left) animation, but I have in mind to start with the front and back as soon as I am finished.

I started working relatively late (for reasons long forgotten), but I feel like I am keeping up with schedule anyway. I approached this animation a bit differently than my past ones. At first, I wanted the movements to look stiff, like it was hard to actually walk in this armor (which it probably is). I did this by separating all the parts, like torso, legs, arms, and head and put them in different layers. I then went on with animating only the legs so that they were perfect, since they are the most important, before starting with anything else.

I began with taking out 4 key frames, but when I started filling out the in-betweens I realized they did not quite fit together, so I changed them.  This resulted in 5 key frames with 4 frames each as in-betweens, except the fifth as it is the last one. I finally ended up with 21 poorly animated frames. The animation did not look stiff, as I had hoped, but instead it looked more like a puppet on strings that was merely moving its legs back and forth. I decided to take a break and look at it later which felt like a bit of a set back since I had put down lots of hours but new that nothing was of worth.

My next fight with the animation went much better. I started with looking at how people actually walked and quickly realized just what I had made wrong. After taking the first step, I had simply reversed the movement to make it look like the avatar had put down the foot instead of actually making them put it down. For someone who has not done lot of walk-cycles before it was almost fun to redo half of my frames just to fix that mistake. But I still ended up with 21 frames, which I thought were too many. I wanted to shrink it to 12 but finally ended up with 13 that I am pleased with, even if it still is some work to be done.

The first .gif is the first try, but unfortunately only half of it since i changed the frames before I realized i might want it for the blog. The second .gif is the improved one, done quickly just to see if my theory worked.

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About Ellen Mellåker

2014  Graphics

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