From the previous feedback on my art guide, I wasn’t very confident in the project anymore. Instead of thinking too hard on it, I’ve split the work up with my group where I’ll be mainly focusing on the main playable character. I’ve messaged into my group for what kind of animation they’re looking ☻ Logan was mainly in charge of the games side so he provided me a small list that I can work off from.
The first tries will be trying out if the animation works and if I’m matching up with my art style guide that we made previously with updates.
ART GUIDE UPDATE
Most of the style guide was kept the same except for the fish people where we don’t include the neck but keep the head and body connected like SpongeBob characters. Also we needed more of the environment sorted out, I’m hoping that Tori can rework it and update us about it so we can help out when we’ve done our part.
CHARACTER
Firstly, I would need to create a few designs and send into my group for them to give feedback. After a while of waiting for replies, I got nothing so I’m a little bummed out. To actually make this assignment enjoyable for me, I decided to get my friends involved in helping just picking out a few designs I’ve got.
From here, a lot of votes went towards not being big fans of 2 and 3, I decided in the end to combine 1 and 3. Having the main design done, I just need to create a few designs for the helmet and then play around with colour.
Again, getting my friends involved since every time I sent work into group I’d get no response. A majority of the votes went towards 2 and 3 so again, I tried combining the two and then just went straight into playing with colour variations.
Originally everyone got hung up on the colour green so I made everything green just so they can focus on the different ways I’ve arranged the colours. In the end, majority of the votes went to wards 3. Having my final design selected, I can now draw a final design sheet along side start creating some of the assets/animations for my group which this week I’ll be mainly trying to get the walk and run down before attempting the other mechanics needed.
DEFAULT WALK & RUN ANIMATION
Bringing my understanding from the previous assignment, I can hopefully create the walk and run without having to struggle. I did during this time take a few days off to just have fun so I wouldn’t be so burnt out from uni, when I got back I got introduced to scribblenauts’ animation, it looked easy but I was unsure how it would look in our style. I believe the main reason we were heading in this direction was because it was ‘easy.’ I wasn’t really impressed by the animation and personally, I wouldn’t have been very happy with my work so I suggested we go for a simple 8 FPS animation with the given time and mainly to just allow my other team member and I have a similar outcome.
Also that 8Fps was mentioned through researching and some things that I have to keep in mind when animating as I’m much more familiar with 24Fps.
WALK
Since my player character has a few different tools they carry around, I decided to create a base without the arms so they can be swapped out depending on what tool they’ll be carrying around.
Which after I added the arms for the default walk cycle, overall this only took a few hours to complete so knowing how efficient I was with animating in this style, I was confident that I’ll get the default walks and runs completed in around 3 days.
RUN
This is just the same process as before, having a version without the arms and one with the arms for a ‘default’ run. I do also need to create an idle animation of the character. Looking at this played back in 8fps, it’s really slow but when looking into sprite making, a video did mention they can change the timing on unreal engine so I didn’t worry too much ☻
IDLE
When looking into idle animations in whacky animations, they either stand very still or at least have some type of bounce animation. I wanted to work my player’s idle animation from the NPCs, I had talked to Kaitlin about how we wanted this which was the bounce.
Looking at her NPCs’ idle animation, there was bend to the knees, head bopping and arms bouncing alongside the body but pops out a little. This was my first attempt on the animation but I soon realised how stiff the hands look alongside it so I went back and adjusted it to give it more motion.
TURNING THEM INTO SPRITES
Having no idea how to turn them into sprites, I did some of my own research on how to turn them into sprites. Wasn’t getting much luck, all I got was pixel sprites so it didn’t really helped but at least it shared on how a sprite sheet should be laid out.
But at least I have notes on how to make funky 2D animation into unreal ☻ After looking around, I decided to message into my group for help and luckily Logan from the games side was online and got back to me, he sent me a few links on how to get my work laid out to be used. The overall process is simple, I just needed to export my animation onto pngs, select them all and let the program combine them all together and this is what they look like:
When requesting them for a video of my sprites being used I was only provided with a Png, they also had a presentation to show the current process of the game around week 6. I had these made a few days before and yet they still used the sample provided from before.
PIPELINE
While talking to my group or mainly the animation side of work, I’ve created a very quick pipeline of the 13 weeks to make sure we have assets completed, it’s very boring but I’ll update this soon to fit what I have to complete for my group. As usual in my pipelines, I’d leave 2 weeks free to touch on details and make sure that things are working.
so cool
<3 :] ty bbg