A Little Bit of Attack Animation
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Right, so time for another artefact! Another animation even! This time I’ve worked on the main characters attack animation. And I have to say, despite what everyone else seem to think, animating something that looks human is a lot harder than the Fire Spirit that I wrote about last time. Since we are all quite familiar with how the human body should look and move, any error in anatomy or movement really shines through. I didn’t really experience it the same way with the Fire Spirit. Like the last animation I posted, this animation used one of the already completed idle frame as the base, that I then built from. I did this by sketching the intended movements out in Photoshop’s Timeline. This time, since even small movements in shoulders, head and so on could make the movement seem a bit unnatural, I decided to fill the sketch in to make quite solid silhouettes that I could then work from. If the silhouettes look good in motion, then the filled in lines should also look good was my reasoning. This proved a little trickier than I had thought though. Changes in the lines occurred naturally as I drew over the silhouettes. Unfortunately it seems that I didn’t save the original result, otherwise I could have included that below. When that was done, what remained was to fill in the base colors, and add shadows and highlights. Since I already had the finished Idle animation to look at, the placement of shadows and highlights were mostly not very complicated at all. These occasionally have the same problem as the lines though, that they appear to jump around if you place them just a little bit wrong, but fixing these usually take a lot less time than toiling with the lines. Also, well worth noting since this is an attack animation, one of the most important thing that I thought about when I sketched the attack up was that there had to be none or very little delay from when the attack animation is initiated to when the projectile is spawned. This is not quite as vital when it comes to enemies, but the player should feel that the controls respond appropriately. So I basically had to make the animation work so that the projectile could spawn in the first or second frame to eliminate this. Additionally the attack had to be spammable, meaning that the first frame (assuming that it restarts on frame 1 every time that you press the attack-button) had to be already in the attack animation, or not be so different as to distract from it. There should also be a few frames that function as a “bridge” between attacks. The hand had to remain in the attack position for a few frames so that it wouldn’t look odd when the main character starts lowering his hand between every shot. As a sidenote, it appears that there is a well known bug in Photoshop CS6′s timeline where a lot of functions aren’t installed properly. Unfortunately this happens to affect my CS6 as well. It probably haven’t affected very much related to the project I’m working on right now though, since I most likely would have used frame by frame animation for the characters anyway. However if I did have the other functions as well I could have easily made glowing lanterns and such for the background. So I’ll probably have to look into fixing that somehow. 
Full Attack Animation 
Looping first three frames for spamming attack effect 
A still to see the characters actual colors |
