Finishing up

This post might come up a bit late on Babel, as I stayed in school late attending a group meeting and didn’t remember to write a blog post until I came home just a little while ago. For the same reason, this post is a little rushed, so my apologies.

In any case, it’s blogging day, and this will likely be my last big post on this project as our group has delegated next week to focusing on implementing everything in our game, ironing out major bugs, and spending time writing our individual reports on the project and for our subjects. Let’s get to it.

This week has been dedicated to finishing up the last of the work needed for our game. For me, that meant drawing the eating and death animation for our player fish’s final stage of growth.

For this post, I’ll walk through my process of creating the eating animation, as I’m not quite done with the death animation yet. If you’ve been reading my other blog posts, this one will serve as a refresher on my work process and some animation principles I try to keep in mind while working.

The eating animation plays when the player successfully lunges at an enemy fish and consumes it. This animation is in itself a longer version of a separate biting animation, which uses half of the frames from the eating animation, and it’s used as an indicator to tell the player that they’ve eaten something.

I started out with the very rough sketch above. Admittedly, I’ve felt quite exhausted this last week of work and haven’t quite been in top form, so I feel my work has been a bit sloppy overall the last couple of days. It’s most visible in this sketch of the animation, but thankfully it’s just a sketch, so as long as I could tell what motion I wanted to create while starting on my clean-up, it’s served its purpose.

Given that the fish’s final stage of growth is supposed to be reminiscent of an anglerfish, I wanted to have the fish open its jaw very wide in its eating animation. When it swallows something, it quickly shuts its mouth and stays leaned back for a bit, then moves back into its idle position. Through these movements I made sure to give its fins and the fishing rod on its back follow-through movement to make the motion seem more fluid and make the frames flow together nicely.

This was my first draft of the clean-up. If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know I work by animating one part of the character at a time. For this fish, I always start with animating the general body shape before getting to the details, and it’s a technique I heavily recommend, especially for more detailed designs, as it makes it easier to focus on keeping one detail consistent at a time.

In this first draft I was a bit displeased with the movement of the mouth as it opens, and went back to change that for the next draft.

Now, I’ve made the lower jaw go downwards more as it opens instead of staying in generally the same position for several frames. At this point I’ve also added details such as the teeth and the eye. The eye is actually reused from the idle animation and I just duplicated it for every frame, as I had trouble making the shape of it consistent with all the swirly lines around it.

Next, I went back through every frame and added the fins, now the fish is really starting to come together. Here again I’ve made sure to keep some follow-through in the movement of the fins, particularly the ones on the back. As the fish pulls its “tail” backwards, the fins are pulled along with it, and make a curving motion as they get dragged around by fish’s body.

Finally, for the last detail, the fishing rod. After our programmers implemented the animations for our fish’s second stage of growth into the game, we noticed the fishing rod movements I made for that form were a bit wild and looked a bit off when we had our light filter applied. So for this stage of growth I’ve decided to tone down the movement of the fishing rod.

I haven’t yet added the lamp and wire to the end of the fishing rod, as I think that’s the most annoying parts of animating this character, and I’ve been putting it off until I finish the rest of my work this week. Sorry for the laziness!

Now finally, I went back through all the frames and added some color, and this is how the (mostly) final eating animation turned out:

That’s all for me this time, good night and good luck on finishing up your projects everyone.