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This week I started working on the main character for the game. Going into this task I had a pretty clear vision of how I wanted the character to look, in this case a moth.
Even though I did not really have any knowledge regarding moths I started doing some rough sketches of the body and wings to start off with. A slight problem that I ran into was that my creation started looking somewhat like a butterfly rather than a moth. At this stage I figured that I would actually have to do some research and look closer into how moths actually look. Once I had a few images to refer to I started sketching again and came up with quite a good form. At this point I started creating different limbs on different layers for a so called Clip-Doll. Using a Clip-Doll in the animation stage would make it easier for me to create a skeletal rig and animate that way, having more control over the animation in general. Once the character and clip-doll was complete I then moved on to the coloring part and thought of how I could maintain the same graphical style on the moth as the background without making it blend in too much. This process went forth and back and in the end I ended up with the same colors as we had previously used in the background concept. Thankfully I managed to maintain contrast difference between the moth and the background making it actually stand out whilst maintaining the same graphical style.
The next step was to create the animation of the moth. In this case the main character is a Moth and to be quite honest; I don’t know too much about moths. In order to get a realistic animation I first had to study the movement patterns and movement of moths to get somewhat an understanding of how they move and navigate. I then started with doing some basic animations in Photoshop by animating the wings to have a solid movement.
After doing the animation in Photoshop I am not quite sure that I am happy with the result. I find the way that Photoshop animates and the use of Sprite Sheets rather time consuming and inefficient so I might consider taking the time to learn how to properly create a skeletal rig on the moth and to animate it further in Unity to get a more ”alive” animation next week. Of course this all depends on whether it is a high priority task now that the alpha deadline is coming up. I have however already finished the Doll-Rig so I am pretty much set to go once I want to go and work with Unity.
Overall it’s been an interesting workflow and I have learned a lot of practical things regarding drawing and animation. I’ve also learned that I personally prefer using clip-doll animations rather than using sprite sheet animations and will most likely be working that way in the future.
Stay tuned for progress next week!
#5SD064
About Alexander Sjöberg
2016 Graphics
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