BGP – Day 6
A tree of animationWelcome back! I haven’t started doing gardening (even though the weather is a lot better) the headline is referring to a Animation tree. Its purpose is to capture all the possible animations for an specific character within the game. And since we only have one, we only need to create one. But It might sound easier than it is. The reason it can get complicated, is because it is done through a flow chart connecting the different animations to each other. This results in that you do not only have to imagine every possible move the character is going to do but also how they connect to each other. Which helps with seeing a structure to how they will fit together, the clearer the structure, the easier the rest of the animation work will be. As an example: If you want the character to be able to walk, you write that into your animation tree. If the character is able to jump, then you write that down. If you want the character to be able to jump while walking then you connect the walk animation to the jump animation like this:
And if you want the character to be able to continue to walk after jumping then you connect the jump right back into the walk, like this: Then you do this with all the different combinations, this can be abstracted more, by using color coding and/or by categorizing different animations. This had already been done in the earliest drafts of the concept and this is what the old animation tree looked like:
As you can see it is hard to follow all the lines and how they connect, therefor it might hide some possible issues when it comes to connecting the animations together. When going through this I talked to our lead designer about the different animations, how they would fit and if they should even be used. Most of them was removed and then re-named and re-organized. This is what I came up with:
I am not very satisfied with the result since I had to change it several times as different animations got removed or changed in some way. As the animations change the way they fit into the tree also change. That’s why I’m going to look into having it changed tomorrow and fill out the rest of our shoot-list for our motion capture shoot. That is all for today, take care!  |
