CASE 2: First Entry

SO, this has been the worst week of school yet. The second case may not seem like much, it was so much work. Mostly because I have designed an intricate character. And considering it's due tomorrow and all I have left is the blog post, bear with me. It's late and I need this finished :B In the second case, this was our assignment.

• Create an idle animation for our character

• Create a walking animation for our character (left as well as right)

• Create a jumping animation for our character (though we were allowed to make another sort of move, so long as we showed we understood the anticipation principle)

I have been working nonstop on this, and it has been some trial and failure. Considering I am planning on making a visual novel, this isn't even ideal for the finished product I have in mind. So far I feel like our cases are forcing us into a specific format, and I may just have to change my idea a little, but we will see what I have time to do. Ffff. On to the animations. First I started with my idle animation, which I thought went quite well. It's a mix of frame-by-frame and tweens. Each limb has been put in a layer of its own and the animations are generally simple.

 

I don't know how good this will look as a video. It's better when it loops, so those who wish to see the SWF file can click this link and see it on SWFCabin

 Shaph Idle

And the next is the walk animation. This was where I got stumped. At first I tried some experimenting with tweening and the bone tool, but it didn't look good together with my frame-by-frame animation. Not to mention I was mucking around, making it into a movie clip in the same file where I did the idle animation, and I really don't want to start copying over frames into a new file just to be able to save it and show you all my failure of an experiment. Discarding that idea, I made another attempt at frame-by-frame. I was far, far more pleased. And since the first video still isn't done processing, I have decided I hate blogger's video feature and will provide links to SWFCabin only.

Sketch

Walk Right

Walk Left

The left animation is, obviously, just the right animation mirrorred. It was a bit of a mess, because I couldn't right-click and flip the image horizontally like in Photoshop when entering free transform. I only realized I had to go to the Modify menu and chose the sub-menu 'transform' to get that option when I was already finished flipping it all. Not to mention swapping the weapons in his hands. Ugh. And I didn't even swap the sword. I am lame and the animation is lame.

AND, important. When animating a walk, have a reference to a 'walk cycle' to look at. I tried without one the first time and I struggled. It's easy to find one just by googling 'walk cycle'. This is the one I used.

Now, for my last animation I sort of hurried and shortened it down a bit more than I wanted to. The format got a little weird because I draw so big, leaving little room for jumping or other movements where the character gets a little taller. A jump would have been really tricky to arrange, so I decided to have him slicing a little with his cleaver. Which turned out to be just as tricky, not to mention I forgot his sword AGAIN. Why does he even carry that stupid thing around? Doesn't he know that katanas are an over-used asian stereotype? Sheesh, what a dork.

Choppy choppy

I believe I keep getting a little better for each animation, but we'll see. I am still hoping I will actually be able to use this stuff that I put so much work into without having to change my idea.  This is also frame-by-frame, and it was a hell of a lot of work. I have toiled a little around with backgrounds in photoshop, and I hope I will be able to include a bit of pixel animation. Here's to hoping. A big point is to not use too much pixel art and stick to vectors, which is what Flash is based on. It will make the animation run way more smoothly and load faster.

Also, for the record, fuck Blogger's video feature. It's still processing >:U I don't think this will even work.

ANYWAY, Case 2 is now finished. Only one entry, this time. C: I felt pretty rushed about this all, but I feel that the result was decent. I hope I will be able to spend more time working on my concept and not drawing details on clothing over and over again next week, though.


ZE END!!