The Following two blogs will be separated into two different ones. The first being for the three animations that are required and the second being the progress of the Unreal Scenery.
This blog will cover the process of how I created the animations the for the required task. For the three animations I had to created a walk cycle, running cycle and a body mechanic animation. With each animation, I wanted to experiment with different styles of drawing and colouring.
Planning Stage
Before starting the animation process, I had to firstly plan out my animation. The reason this is an important step is to be able to get a clear idea of what the animation looks like and to save time when creating the animation rather than trying to do it from scratch. While creating the storyboard for the animation, I also looked up at references, ranging from walking, running and punching alongside video example. This will help me make the animations be more fluid and give me an understanding of how body mechanics work and to make sure that the animation feels grounded in reality.
Once the planning is done, I open Clip Studio Paint and create new canvas files by going onto file and new which pops up a window for creating the canvas size. Once everything is in place, I create the area three time for each of the three animation and get started with working on it. When animating these characters, I used Pose to Pose because it got the character to look a lot more consistent in comparison to Straight ahead.
Walk Cycle
When coming up with the walking animation I thought I would do a different walking animation due to having experience from last year, I decided to add something different to the animation to make it challenging. I had to animate a character having their hands in their pockets. As small of a change it is, it has a lot more to offer when it comes to animation. Hands are used for balancing us when walking. However, if you restrain them or put them in your pockets, our balance isn’t going to be great. With this in mind, I realized it would be a good challenge to do as it will require different timing and be a lot slower in comparison to a normal walk.
Now that, I figured out what to do, I need as character for this animation. So, I chose my character Judy for this. The reason as simply because I wanted to animate her for a very long time and thought might as well to animate her again. I started out with a very rough animation of the character. Mainly using three main key frames to plan out the main parts of the action. This is done so I can understand how long would the character need to go from one leg to the other.
Afterwards, I began adding a lot more frames to the animation to get a somewhat fluid motion for the character. This is where also, I began refining the timing of the animation as there were more frames in the timeline. This required a lot of time to preview the animation to make sure I got the correct timing. Once, the timing was figured out, the rough was done. Now all I had to do was by using a separate layer to create a more refined drawing of my character over the old animation.
With that done, the last step was to do the lineart of the animation alongside colouring the animation the same way i did with the refined sketch. For the colour, I wanted to be experimental and decided to create a quick pattern, reduce its opacity from the layer section and use the spray with the bright and dark colour to give it the shading effect. Once that is done, I exported the animation in Clip Studio Paint as a Movie by going onto File, Export Animation and then Movie. This will pop up a window for the ability to render it. Once the options have been made, I click onto render. The video down below is the final result.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/0d9f8a51e90e/
Run Cycle
For the running cycle, I wanted to take a break from my usual style and try something cartoonish instead, so I can experiment with the style and to try something new. For this animation I wanted him to feel very squishy to give me an extra challenge. So, I began animating him normally. However, as I kept going, the timing began to mess up on me. I had tried to fix the timing, but it managed to get a lot worst. So instead, I started a brand new one and continued from there. As you can see from the two GIF below, the animation timing is like comparing day to night. The one on the left feels like the timing is off while the one on the right feels well timed.
As I was finished with the timing of the animation, I was thinking of how can I make it different. So, I decided to use the lineart from the organ donation advert that I worked one as I found it to be a very interesting and unique style choice. For the colouring of the animation, I decided to use a screentone pattern to compliment the lineart. The way I did the screen tone was going to the tabs on the right near the canvas and selected the dotted folder, this gave me the options of different screentones to use. Once I found something that I like, I simply drag the screentone onto the canvas and clip it to the animation folder.
When finishing the animation, I wanted to do something more and decided to create a parallxing background. So, I created the assets such as the buildings, floor and sky by using brush tools. Once that was done, I exported all of the assets as a PNG for every single element in the scene including the animation and put them in After Effects. Once those assets were put in the composition, the buildings, were selected. With the layer select, I used the shortcut P to get to the position settings of the animation and clicked onto the watch icon. This will make the computer move the asset from point A to point B. I did the exact so for the other building set, but moved the animation to happen later than the other asset to give it the illusion of depth. Once the animation was done, I exported it into Adobe Media as an MP4 and thats how the animation was done.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/4bf306c7de45/
Body Mechanics
For the Body Mechanic animation, I wanted to do a person punching a training bag because I wanted to redeem myself from last year’s project where I had a character punch a bag. However, it didn’t look quite as polished so I decided to make a new animation based on it. While at it, I decide to experiment with a different brush set for line art and found this brush with an interesting and unique brush texture. So, I download it and got it ready for use.
Surprising for this animation, it went quite well in comparison to the others in terms of progress. It was somewhat challenging due to me animating two entities alongside trying to get them to time with each other so the viewer may not be distracted. I also tried to exaggerate the gesture of the fighter to give it a lot more life. Once the animation is done, I exported it and here it is.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/8496a3203f9b/
Conclusion
Overall, I am happy with what I have created however. This task has been a very interesting as I got to learn about animation and get a better understanding of it alongside to not underestimate the duration of the project as I thought this could be done in a few week it rather took a long time to make. Probably one thing that I blame myself for is time management as I felt like I wasn’t able to manage it properly leaving me to rush it close to the deadline. Other than that I am pretty happy with the results. With all that said I am still optimistic that second semester is going to be better. I have taken precautions to improve my mental health and to find out what is wrong with. I will also try to improve my skills by trying to gather more reference alongside using information from additional resources like books and videos to be used in my blogs to greater power. Lastly I will try to not underestimate both my ability as an artist and also to try and not underestimate how long will my task take to complete rather than waiting and finishing them around the time the task has to be submitted for the deadline.