Stephen- Level transition animation
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Today I have made an animation of Stephen swimming into the background for the level transition. This task was my main priority this week. Here you can see the whole animation.
The first step was to figure out how Stephen is looking from behind, and that part was actually tricky, especially with the fishtail. I had to imagine how my swimming animation of Stephen from the side, would look like behind him. I started with drawing two key frames, first one when the fin is in the middle and one when the fin is furthest away, to the right. 1. 2.
After that I filled in the gap in between those two frames, with one frame, to make the animation look smooth and clean in the movements. 3.
These three frames I have been writing about was actually the only frames I drew. I figured and thought about how I could create this animation in the best way to save time, and it hit me; This animation is directly behind Stephen, so that mean I could just mirror the frames. I got one animation to the price of a half, which was really awesome! This is what I mean by ”mirror”
These frames are number 2 and 3 mirrored. I made the gun as its own, loose asset, so that one is not attached to/a part of the original frames. To conclude this, I only needed three different frames to create an eight-framed animation, I saved a bunch of hours by mirroring the frames and I am mostly satisfied with the final outcome, if I would change anything it would be to make the fin on the left side more smooth in its movement, although I am satisfied with what I was able to produce in such a small amount of time!  |
The next step was to fill in the frames with local colors (the purple and yellow), shadows and light. Since I already had my first animation of Stephen, I did not have to think about the colors, I just sampled them from the other one and added them to this animation. I added a new layer in Photoshop for the light and changed it from ”normal” to ”Overlay” to get them bright details. I added a new layer for the shadows as well and changed from ”normal” to ”multiply”. All of these steps I made for all three frames.
