Animation in progress
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This week I have been working on animations for our game and my graphics course. We have gotten a lecture about using bone animation in Unity to animate our characters. Although my character was suitable enough for a bone animation, I had difficulty following the lecture and understanding the Unity bone system. After having trouble keeping up with the lecture I spend some time fiddling with it at home. I could not get it to work and thus decided to manually animate the character for our game. At that point it was simpler and quicker to animate it manually since that required techniques that I have some more experience with. The character design was also partially flawed for bone animation as I had not taken that into account when I created my character. Only later, during a meeting with my team, did they point out to me that there was a way to get my character design to work with bone animation. Although that still did not mean I knew how to use it, they did make me realize that there is more possible than I initially had thought. Manually animating my character, which as you can see is based on a horse piñata, was not difficult. Photoshop has a few handy tools that were perfectly suitable for the way my character was designed. However, I realized I had underestimated how difficult it is to create a smooth and believable animation. Initially I wanted the animation to resemble a running horse, but I did not realize that recreating that movement for my character, which does not have joints, was not going to work out well. My first attempt thus looked like a very awkward stuttering piñata. I went back to adapt it to its very limited joint movement and I managed to make it look a little more natural but it was still a clunky animation. I realize now that I rushed into it a bit too quickly and did not properly plan my animation. Using key poses would have given me a clearer direction during the animation and I should have added more frames to the animation.
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Later in the project, when there is a bit more breathing room, I will try to change the animation to a bone animation so that I can properly use those techniques to animate characters in the future.