Author: helou-s

Animation:

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Sophie and I worked close together on the animation for the character asking each other for feedback through sync sketch and discord. When we could, we asked lecturers specially when there was an issue we were both were unsure of problem:

– Like my walk cycle looking uncanny. I asked lectures, classmates and teammates, and they could all see it, and some pointed out other small details like the heal looking off: it was two frames that were too close to each other.

For the uncanny walk, it was what the lecturer had said, the speed of the arm and legs were off, the arms were too fast. But it still felt like something was off and it was the timing of the arms and legs being too close to one another.

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we worked in each other’s favours as she preferred the block out stage laying out the keyframes, I was happy to clean up the line art and add inbetweening I also made sure I filled in all the frames so she could use the feature of clipping mask in procreate when it came to colours, and finally she was happy to help with the colouring process.

I still used referencing, mostly filming myself and drawing a stick figure on top to make sure it was fluid and keeping three principles in mind: overlap, arcs and a bit of anticipation.

Due to our time limit if we had the chance, we reused animations with a few tweaks to cut time wasted.

The creatures:

Info: the creatures both are extreme representations of the way he sees his parents based on the way they treat him; the mother is the pill back spider and the father is the snake belt.

Having started to study the snake and spider crawl and slither cycle, I compensated with Sophie doing all the colour for the characters animation, so I did all the snakes animation, a slither and attack. I looked at how other people had done their slither cycles, snake walk cycles, but I did keep in mind that my snake was from a side profile and was thin because he is meant to be half snake half belt. It took two attempts for me to eventually understand how the curves would be pushed out at the end, like a wave curled in and kicked out.

 

Although Sophie gave me a hand and coloured the spider for me as I still had texturing to do and I was running out of time. The spider was the most time-consuming animation out of the two other characters, getting the movement of each leg right was quite difficult, I used sync sketch to draw visible red dots that help me follow the legs and pinpoint the keyframes. I still would like to practice it as I don’t feel comfortable yet with the walk cycle.

I also did the little hench men spiders that are the first obstacles in my level.

I redrew and animated Sophies spiders she made as decorations and used it for the level.

Level design:

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We had some unexpected changes in the number of people we had in our group, so we had to take on more tasks so we wouldn’t fall behind. I definitely underestimated level designing I thought it would go a lot quicker than it did, but I ended up redesigning a couple of times:

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It was one part of the assignment where I wanted to get as much feedback as a could from different people and keep in mind what our characters will be capable of doing, meaning what our scripter will be capable of achieving on his own and not make things boring and repetitive. It was a test of our creativity as animation students meeting the limits that the scripting process was capable of being achieved, it really made me realise how free we are in animation when it comes to what we want to see and do with our characters in comparison to restrictions that games have. Although that was the case, we constantly held meetings on the Miro board, which I started to get along with, and checked with our scripter if the ideas we had were possible, he explained to us how it would work in practice which help when redesigning, I started to understand what the limits were and how to go about it.

for example:

If it wasn’t a feature before it can’t just appear once, like gliding from point A to point B in a game which so far was just jumping and continues with jumping later.

We need to keep in mind to introduce it and have it be a feature in the game not a onetime experience, I also found it nice to introduce several different features and, in the end, have a combination of all of them, like the Games student lecturer recommended in my level of slide, jump, swing.

But this did take a toll on the amount of time we had left for our animations an texturing.

Ideas that fell behind:

This project was probably the first project where I saw so much of our initial plans slowly falling apart and having to give them for example the real world, at this stage we had all done our rooms, laid out all the assets and decorated with 2D props, but because of our small teams and time being against us we had to abandon that part entirely and rewrite the story with the help and recommendation of lecturers so we work with what we have so far and the rest isn’t overwhelming us in the future. And I can confidently say that it was for the better that dropped those plans because it was extremely overwhelming personally and I feel like I didn’t meet expectations with this project, my own and that of my teammates.

Experimenting:

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While describing the style which required line art and potentially a cel shader, it would be a good idea for the 3D elements to not look out of place. Which compelled me to look into post processing and try and see what we could achieve in a more convenient way our style without only using textures. My research though evolved with our idea, initially it was simply line art we were interested in like the grease pencil in blender and perhaps a combination of a celshader so it looks like the style Sophies guide expressed, a 2D simple style. The result although what we wanted, we didn’t like it as a group but it was a small practice with the nodes in Unreal engine and it led into looking at a painterly style which sounded like it aligned with our concept for the character, a little artist, because he has a power to draw things that will come in handy when he goes into his adventure.

I liked the flexibility of the painterly shader, with the instances it allowed me to customise it as much as I wanted to and the look of brush strokes like that of the many painting worlds in video games like the witcher 3, oblivion and more, fit into our concept in more of a creative way then just the celshader. But when we reached the final stages of our game the clutter of objects in the world made the post processing effect feel overwhelming and hazy, it might be since our character is so small in comparison to the world and made it harder to see in the end.

Painterly guide I followed: https://youtu.be/JWCponhcSao?si=_PRFMFRJD9jrGECU

Celshader:https://youtu.be/RkFwe7JI8R8?si=RfipyNrp87CKvXQJ

Although nodes looked intimidating in the start, I realized that once I was familiar with how they worked it started making sense and encouraged me to try and to recreate the effect without the help of the video at some points, but I couldn’t get there yet.

The few I looked into and my tests:

painterly and celshader/ painterly:

 

painterly:

 

Celshader:

Line art and celshader:

Line art and painterly with exclusion node on sofa:

Style guides:

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What I did a style guide for: Characters, enemies and animation.

At this stage of the project, we hadn’t settled down on the style and the right words to describe it. We had ideas and narratives going but we were lost with the choice of word to describe what we wanted to go for. Although, with the lecture we were given in which we were tasked to analyse the style of a game or movie of our choice, I found it quite helpful in understanding what was wanted from us a lot clearer and we decided as a group to also do that exercise again with one of the games students as well.

This cleared up the image of what we had to do which later led to us having concepts that already were within the same universe.

My concept:

ex: Sophies concept

When it came to doing the guides, I paid close attention to the examples that were given to us and the potential mistakes that might arise when redrawing the same character multiple times. I even found my own guides handy when I reached the animation stage. Heeding the words of our lectures I made sure I meticulously followed my peers’ guides for example when drawing 2D assets, I consulted the guide and my team mate to double check that I understood the style and the guide.

On the other hand, I feel like because our story kept on changing and ideas continued to develop, not all the parts of the guides were followed to the letter, for example we were meant to have two worlds, two colour pallets, but later we ended up with one world and mostly used one colour pallet. In short ideas changed and the rules changed with them.

For the technical guide, as our teammate had unfortunately left us we didn’t make one, but It wasn’t something we felt the need for mostly thanks to a very active group chat that helped and supported each other a lot.

My style guide examples:

Concept:

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As I explained earlier, the playable character is an odd-looking little boy who escapes into his creative imagination to entertain himself. The goal of our game is for the player, to reach the boys treasure, which is the many papers his father has in his office so the boy could then continue to practice his art.

We all looked for any games we could inspire our minds with, and compiled pictures and screenshots on a miro board, which I wasn’t very familiar with but still participated on a more familiar software and shared it in the group chat.

My research:

 

Fran bow/ Little misfortune/ little nightmares/ goodbye Seoul being the most important ones.

We got started on visual concepts of rooms and characters

Here are some of the ones I works on:

Brief:

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This is a brief introduction of what this game group project was about and my role in it.

Our game, “little boy” is a 2D/3D platformer moving in a 2D space but with the environment in a 3D space, our props were a combination of 2D, mostly smaller interactable ones and 3D, usually bigger environmental ones. The character himself was in 2D, and it is composed of 3 levels in different parts of the child’s home seen through his artistic imaginative mind. We wanted it to feel like a children’s book but with a grimmer twist, like Fran Bow or Little Nightmares, which reflects on the child’s neglect by his parents.

As a group we decided on each other’s tasks based on our strength and so I was tasked with character design, 2D assets and animation. Due to the changes our group experienced during this assignment, we all ended up doing a bit of work in whatever field we could help in, due to the lack of team members. It was decided as a team I would be doing the design of the main character and the enemies, as well as, with the help of my only other animation peer, we separated the task of animating, for most of the animations, in 3 parts, meaning one person does the block out, the other line art and in between and finally one the colours. An attempt to speed up the process.

I helped with making some additional props in 2D for the office and some of the kitchen. As well as doing the 3D assets for the kitchen and the office, with some were even recycled in different locations.

Some research and experimenting were done on my part for potential post processing, which later didn’t really fit into the concept of our game anymore and needed more research done.

Finally, us animation students gave level designing a go, which was a very new, but difficult yet interesting attempt. I took charge of designing the concept, block out and final stage of the kitchen/office level which would be the final level.

My reflective blog:

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After a lot of back and forth on which article we would like to work on, especially in which category we would rather focus on to limit our selection, we settled for this article “how does time work in The Simpsons” by Davis, A. M., Gilboy, J., & Zborowski, J.

We started of by tasking ourselves to each read the article and take notes. I read through the paper and took notes to summarize what I had understood and at times added a few notes on parts I agreed with or found interesting and if I didn’t understand something or if it stood out the wrong way to me.

After communicating our understanding of the article and its relevance to our assignment, which unfortunately in the end we didn’t fully manage to reach based on the feedback from our presentation, I believe it was a good learning experience. We each worked on a part we seem to be interested in and have a critical opinion of, whether it was agreeing with the author and learning of a different way to classify time in the animation discipline and its effect on the longevity of the series or disagreeing and finding flaws in the articles structure for example.

Unfortunately, I’m slightly disappointed I did not involve more of my research into the presentation. Some interesting points were made, with an external example of adventure time to apply the idea of tropes that classify animations into different timeline classes. As well as fully agreeing with the author on their third option of a possible answer as to how time works, being that it Is a fictional world and applying our logic on how time works isn’t so reasonable, it is a paradox but the writers have creative freedom and no rules that tie them down as to how time should function within their universe.

I do believe I learned not only from an animation point of view on how I could personally view time in my own work in the future or even animations I’ve watched in the past and will later. But we learned how to analyse an article and think critically of what the author has written, use the universities resources and take notes, taking feedback from our lectures on our presentation as important advice and utilising it, as well as keeping in mind the other feedback people have received if they felt relevant and useful. For our next assignment I have in mind what we should be looking out for in our essays and feel ready to investigate the subject I have in mind.

For our next assignment, I have an idea on which subject I’d like to work on, and if so, the knowledge I gained from this experienced shouldn’t be neglected but used as a potential point of view which will refer to passage of time and change. Be it a possibility, it is still interesting to at least try and integrate the information and knowledge I’ve gathered working on this assignment and using it to my advantage in the next, like an anchor point to my research.

Overall, the subject the article is on, is not something I am familiar with at all compared to my team. Although that may be the case, even if the language in the article was quite complex, it still managed to convey its ideas with examples of episodes that were definitely supporting the argument. Not only did I learn from the article itself and doing my project on critical thinking and reflecting on what I’ve read but watching my peer’s presentation was even more helpful. Although I wished I could have a second try at going more into detail about my analysis during the presentation and link my thinking to the quotes I liked, I believe this mistake was a necessary learning experience.