Splosion in motion
Flight of the Giraffa – Update 3So for my third post I’m going to talk about an animation I’ve created during this week. This animation didn’t actually take as much time as the one I wrote about in my first update, even thou it’s a little more complex. Probably because this time around I had gotten used to using the frame animation in Photoshop. The entire process for this artifact took me about 7 hours, which is about the time I anticipated. In our game there is a specific thing that the player needs to do in order to obtain a power-up. That thing is to shoot down incoming meteors that has traversed from distant galaxies, bringing with them god knows what. Anyway, this brings me to one of the things I have been working on this week, the animation for when the meteors in the game explodes. When I designed the meteors I didn’t want them to just be gray rocks that easily could melt into the background and potentially be ignored. So to make them ‘pop’ a bit more I made them consist of mostly glowing lava, surrounded by a small layer of rocks. I was really pleased with how the design turned out, and I actually got a little bit of inspiration to their design from some levels in Super Mario Galaxy. When I got around to animating the meteor I actually had a lot of fun, at first. I realized like two frames in that this would take quite some time to finish. This mindset made me put the animation on hold for a day while I worked on other assets. Eventually I continued with the animation and made it a total of 12 frames. Since the animation is of a floating lava-rock that explodes, I used a reference picture that showed a version of how an explosion could look to help me on the way. This is how the sprite sheet for the animation turned out: For each frame I started with the line work and continued with coloring it. The hard part for me was to make the explosion that occurs in the middle to look consistent in every frame. But I think that the end result looks like it will work pretty good for our game. I’m most pleased with how the rocks on the meteor look when they are broken apart by the force that occurs at the center when it explodes. This is a rendition of how the meteor looks in motion:
That’s all for this week, see ya in the next post!  |
