Animation Methods Part 2
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This is a continuation of last week’s post as well as last week’s task. But let’s do short recap of last week. Last Week So last week I started on my crawler attack (swipe) animation for my game (why? Because an enemy should be able to attack, right?). What I made was a puppet to help me see what the finished animation would look like. I also wrote shortly about some different methods I like to use when animating. As well as some troubles I had with the puppet (namely the legs). But that’s all part of history now, isn’t it?
This weekWhat did I do this week? Well, as earlier stated I continued the crawler animation. I added all of the body parts needed and the animation is close to being finished. It’s only missing some fine-tuning and colors.  I spent about 8.5 hours on the crawler this week and most of the time went down on trying to get the legs right. The legs have always been my biggest difficulty with this animation. Seeing as the crawler is a fantasy creature my problem was to make the leg movements look natural. But after many failed attempts I finally gave up. I’ve been trying to find references to other animals with similar “anatomy” but I have not succeeded. Frankly, I did not figure out how to solve the problem and I’m not sure how I would. So any advice would be appreciated. Despite the time spent on the legs I managed to get a lot more done. Because of an earlier animation I did (the crawler walk), I already had the body parts I needed for the animation. And because all of the body sections were separate it was easy for me to cut and paste them onto my puppet. I would say that it went pretty quickly, but that would be a lie. But it definitely did speed up the process.it wasn’t, however, as easy as copy pasting. I also had to use a lot of manipulation tools and editing to get the body parts suitable for the situation. The warp, free transform and perspective tools are quite intuitive for this kind of job, and my personal advice to you is to not underestimate them (although animations usually look better when drawn by hand).
Although I promised to furtherer talk about more animations methods I didn’t quite manage to write them in time. But it will be edited in to the post later on, so stay tuned!  |