Animation preproduction

I have spent time today doing my animation preproduction for my animated short which I will be making after the Christmas break. Please view the PDF below to see my planning progress.

Animation Plans

Acclimatize Improvements

Once again today I have dedicated a lot of my time to working on Acclimatize. I am very happy with the progress I have made as I can now feel the game slowly coming together. The game still requires a lot of work, however, the game is technically fully functional and can easily be developed into a finished game. Today I have fixed the scripting for the character movement and jump animations, admit ably with a bit of help from my lecturers as it was reasonably difficult setting the animations for the commando character to work correctly. The movement animations may still not be completely perfect and still require a bit of tweaking but this will be done over time make the best possible game.

The main difficulty I had when setting up the movement animations was having the animations flow together correctly, while also looking correct. What I mean by this is that making the jump animation look natural (realistic) was difficult when trying to scripting it in with other animations.

As well as improving the scripting of the game I have also begun properly constructing the first level using the modular block system I have created; using grass blocks, dirt blocks and stone blocks. I plan on using this system with various other textures to construct levels in other biomes for the other demo levels.

Unfortunately, our original aims for the game demo may no longer be possible for the Christmas portfolio deadline. However, the official demo will most definitely contain everything we originally planned. Whereas, the Christmas portfolio demo game will likely only contain the Commando character (with the other characters “coming soon”) with three out of the 4 biomes having levels that are playable. This is simply because we are limited by time and restricted by the amount of us there is, resulting in work taking longer than the larger team can produce.

Despite this we are still aiming to make the best quality and most optimized game possible, avoiding cutting corners as much as possible so that is game truly represents the abilities that we currently have. We have already discussed our ambitions for the game and they may be large but not out of reach. We are planning on working on this game throughout our two years here at Sunderland College and possibly after. However, aims are to have a fully working and published game hopefully by next summer. It will take a lot of dedication but we want this to happen so we are going to push for it. Ultimately it will hopefully at least result in a good game to be featured in our portfolios.

Acclimatize Progress

Over the last week or so I have been collaboratively working on a game called Acclimatize with Josh and Liam. The video above shows the current state at which the game is at. I have put a lot of effort and work in this game so far and I am very happy with the way it is turning out. Apart from the characters featured in the video (which were created by Josh) I am responsible for the reset of the progress that the game has made. While I have processed a lot of my attention on creating what you can see above, Josh has been putting his focuses on creating game characters for us to put into the game, while Liam worked on concept art. However, the idea was created collaboratively as a team.

Overall, I am very happy with all of the progress the game demo has already shown. I am really looking forward to getting the demo fully working for people to try out so that we can get feedback and use that to improve the game and complete the fully working game for our portfolio.

Next steps are to setup the animations properly for all 3 characters in Unity as well as building all four levels for the demo and linking them to the main menu. As well as this I need to add a coin system which allows for the player to collect coins and for a score to be kept.

Animating my Magica Voxel rabbit character

I have spent some time today animating my rabbit character, using Maximo, to be used in my 2.5D platform game after the Christmas break. I made multiple animations which will be used in various situations in the game. The example above is a walking animation which will play every time the player walks forwards. I have also created; a running, jumping, crouched walking, dying and dancing animation which will be used, when appropriate, throughout my game. I also plan on making an idle animation pose to be used when character is standing still, however, I am not sure as of right now, how I want this to look, so I will be doing this animation further in the future.

I am happy with how my animations are already looking as they look like they would easily fit into the style game I envision making. I have used a stylised look, to make a ‘cartoony-like’ feel, which I hope will appeal to all a wide audience. I can’t wait to actually start building this game, but for now I am putting a lot of my attention towards my portfolio game with Josh and Liam. I will post more information on our project shortly.

Creating a 3D Model Rig – Maya animation

In Matt’s lesson today I learned how to setup my own character set to animate in Maya. I also learned more about deformers and character sets. The main two character sets I used were ‘bend’ and ‘squash’, both are very self explanatory and allow you to get a very stylised and exaggerate animation. As for creating character sets I combined all of the attributes of my coffee cup to one hierarchy and then selected them and set a character set so that when that is selected, all of my coffee cup will be selected rather than one aspect.

I am happy with the progress I have made so far with animation. I personally think that my 3D model looks fairly good and will suit the animation ideas I have for my animated short. Some ideas I currently have are; making the cup bounce around, be knocked over, the lid come off and the eye brows and eyes to move. I am aiming to make a very cartoony animation, taking inspiration from Disney animations and their style.

3D Character Model (SWAT) – Adobe Fuse

I spent time today experimenting with Adobe Fuse. In this time I created my own 3D model of a person, which I made look like a “SWAT” solider. I began by creating the raw human without any clothing before customising it and adding clothing it make it have the final result I show below. I am overall very pleased with the way the character has turned out and in my opinion It could easily be used in a 3D shooting game and fit in well.

After this I experimented with animating my character. I decided to create a variety of short fighting animations which could be pieced together to make a fighting / hand to hand combat animation, in a game. I plan on learning how to do this in the next VFX lesson so that I can get a good looking final result.

Lamp Animation – Maya

Blocking is an animation technique in which key poses are created to establish timing and placement of characters and props in a given scene or shot. This technique is most commonly used in 3D computer animation. Animation Blocking is used in industry for the purpose of layout the foundation of an animation, making it easier to modify compared to jumping straight into frame by frame. This can similarly be compared to how an artist may sketch out a piece of work before making it permanent.

This animation demonstrates the principles of anticipation and exaggeration, as well as others but these specifically. The anticipation in the animation is shown when the lamp crouches and wiggles before jumping. Whereas, the exaggeration is shown by the extremely far down crouch and large jump.

Overall, I am very happy with the way the looks and I feel like I achieved a very effective block out animation. As for the final result I am still pleased with it, however I would like to improve the part where the lamp jumps and is in the air heading upwards. I plan on improving this by adjusting the position of the keyframe between the jump from the ground and the peak point the lamp reaches. I feel like this would make the jump appear more realistic and flow smoother.

 

 

 

Pixel Art Rabbit Animation

I decided that I would have some fun and experiment in making a small pixel art animation. I decided to make this fairly simple rabbit character, which I made in four different view points (front, back, left side view and right side view) using Adobe Photoshop. The Character only consists of seven different colours and follows a fairly simple colour pallet, as well as being of a reasonably small size.

To create this animation I simply started with the initial character design. From there I was able to add in guide lines to get the proportions correct for the other three views. Whereas the shading and highlights were done by eye, using my knowledge of perspective which I have from previous art experience I have from my love for art.

I am overall quite happy with the final product. I realise it is by no means a complex or impressive piece of work. However, I believe that it is good practice in animation and character design for games. It is even possible that I could use this character in a game further down the line or even just as a concept in a game before a specific character is created. I like being able to have a collection of assets (no matter what they may be) so that I have a big selection when it comes to creating games.

For my next artistic project I hope to make a stylised 2D character. I hope to make it in the style of which a character would be made for a platform game for example. I believe a generic character like this would also be good practice to create and would also be useful to keep with my other assets for potential further use.

 

Bouncing Ball Animation

Above is a very small animation of a bouncing ball I created using Maya. This was my first ever time attempting to animate and personally I believe it went fairly well. In a short period of time I was able to make this basic animation with very little help (working independently – experimenting) . I know that the quality of this isn’t very impressive at all and does require a lot of work, but I’d say for my first attempt it is alright and can be made to look much better once I develop my animation skills more.

To improve my animation I plan on adding in more key frames, to create a more curved bounce, which follows a arc, for a better quality look. I also intend on using graph editor to improve the arc shape and therefore improve the quality of the bounce. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time in class, when creating this, to use the graph editor and improve the look of the animation. I will use the graph editor to make more even arcs as soon as I have time to do so. I believe this could completely improve the look of the animation.

Principles of animation – Luxo Jr

I used this Animation to practice spotting when different principles are used. The principles which I spotted were:

• Squash and stretch – gives a sense of weight and flexibility to drawn objects. It can be applied to simple objects, such as a bouncing ball, or more complex constructions, like the musculature of a human face. Most important aspect of this principle is that the object doesn’t change volume when squashed or stretched.
• Anticipation – used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic.
• Staging – Its purpose is to direct the audience’s attention, and make it clear what is of greatest importance in a scene.
• Follow through and overlapping action – Two closely related techniques which help to render a movement more realistic, and help to give the impression that characters follow the laws of physics including the principle of inertia.
• Arcs – the most natural action tends to follow an arched trajectory, and animation should adhere to this principle by following implied “arcs” for greater realism.