VERTICAL SLICE
Since week 10 was the final teaching week before Easter break, the class time was devoted to a play testing session where all the students and tutors were able to look at every group’s progress so far. After that day we had critique on our project and during a group meeting later that week we organised them into segments, and colour coded critique relating to different things in the project. Grey was an animation critique so that was my department – and people said they wanted diagonal animations.
In my honest opinion, I felt we had enough animations for a range of movement, and wasn’t particularly excited about having to create 4 new animations over the Easter break when I’d worked hard to get them all completed for the plat testing session. But I understand critique is important, and see in the long run that it will help the overall look of the game.
I started with the diagonal front-view walk. Having done so many walk and run cycles in this project it wasn’t too hard to do, the only difficult thing was figuring out how the angle worked – there are a few small issues with the angle and I was worried it would look too similar to the side walk cycle as that also has more of a front view than a side view, but I think it’ll turn out fine in the final outcome since I think there’s enough difference between the two.
Next I moved onto the back view walk, trying to figure out the angle on the movement of the legs on this one I found significantly harder, and I had to spend quite a bit of time fiddling around with my sketch before I felt it was good enough to line and colour. Obviously since the back views are mostly coat, they took way less time to colour than their front counterparts.
Now that I had the walks done, I could move onto the runs. I did both of the walks first because having completed them I can basically use the same torso/head animations which meant I only needed to change the respective arms and legs motions. It meant that the runs were able to be completed faster than the walks since I only had the limbs to worry about.
I think that the diagonal front run is a bit choppy as I added one less frame in the run animations than I used in the walk ones, so that they go a bit faster in terms of motion. The back run however I think turned out fine. With only really the expressions and the motion of the arms/legs changing they were also very straight forward to complete.
This means that my final animation count for this project was 15 animations for our main character.
And with this final animation, all of them are done!