After we got back from our Easter break, Week 9 definitely threw us a curveball. I wasn’t in class as I wasn’t feeling well, however I learnt that we needed to completely rescope our project at this point.
However, after having a meeting about it we were able to establish some more specific changes we wanted for our game.
For now, I did some research on animal idle animations:
My idle cattle dog animation 🙂
byu/Indosmoshna inPixelArt
Some notes I made for myself to sort out in the next few weeks based on feedback from group:
And my plans for the giraffe idle animation were as such:
- breathing
- tail flick
- possibly raising hoof
- change in expression
- blink
- looking side to side with head and/or eyes
I condensed this to just breathe, blink and tail flick.
The head movement was intended to be its movement as it breathed.
I attempted to make the movement a little subtler.
Rough layouts for how the head and body would move with some slight delay for the head.
Attempted to animate the tail:
Which I then slowly improved on:
I liked the way I was able to convey the stiffer upper part of the tail with the hair part having a more flowy movement.
I was initially trying to create a breathing effect for the giraffe, but it was difficult to animate this without making it look unnatural, so then after some feedback I decide to just keep the body still. This would reduce the workload as well.
When it came to animating the giraffe, I knew that the design had a lot of spots, however I felt willing to animate them regardless, especially as for example with the idle animation not too many of them would be actually moving. Additionally, I just felt like without as many spots it wouldn’t fit the character as well. I knew that it would take some more time, but I felt that it was a fair trade-off.
At this point I was really happy with how the animation was coming together! I decided to add some movement to the ears for that extra bit of personality.
And the giraffe was alive! It’s definitely not perfect, but considering the difficulty with the spots on the neck I think I did a decent job. It just needed colour.
I was wondering how I’d go about colouring my animations, so I did some research as well as I had remembered learning about some way of speeding up the colouring process in ToonBoom animation some time ago.
However, I sadly wasn’t able to use these techniques due to only having ToonBoom Essentials.
So I just went about it my own way.
And that way was by duplicating the line art, filling with it with the fill bucket, then deleting the line art off the colour layer by “selecting by colour”.
I has some slight difficulty with the fill bucket in toonboom, as it would leave some white pixels that I needed to manually colour in, however I finally managed to get the idle animation for the giraffe done.
I then had a go trying to follow the tutorial we had been given for exporting animations from ToonBoom into Unreal Engine in a test project, so that I could either show the game design students how to do it later, or I could potentially just go onto the project and put the sprites in myself.
But I encountered some difficulties…
The sprites were kind of out of order which was a pain trying to put them together.
Then the colours were washed out in my giraffe sprite for seemingly no reason.
And this screen looked different for me as well.
I attempted to fix the problem by deleting the material at the side and seemingly broke creating sprites in Unreal engine for myself for good.
Lesson to myself to actually read warning messages from Unreal, because no matter if I uninstalled and reinstalled PaperZD, it still wouldn’t work and I couldn’t find any solution for the problem.
I’m thankful it ultimately wasn’t up to me to actually put the sprites in the game.
I was at least able to share some information with the group based on my testing experience.
