For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on animating our tribal character. While animation is not my strong suite, it gave me time to relearn what I had forgotten… or more specifically, weights. In order to make sure the animations were not “floaty”, I animated using the pose to pose method, starting in stepped to figure out the proper timing and keyframes, before slowly adding inbetweens and smoothing them all out.
Also I’ve been forcing myself to animate more in graph than using the manlipulator.
When animating the villager, we wanted to make them appear to be full of energy, never running out, but also look as if they were constantly on a mission.
One of my issues with animating this was trying to show breathing when running. Sadly, once I animated it, it realized that by adding heavy Nonetheless, I still need to work on the chest of the villager when they run, as it seems less like heavy breathing and more like… a vacuum sucking on their chest.
For the chopping animation, we had a problem with trying to figure out how whether or not we wanted to add a step forward when the villager began to chop. At first we were worried about if it seemed like enough power was seen in the final few frames.
We decided against doing the step in the end because if the villager did more than one chop to the tree, just to avoid having to add more wait time for the player into the action. Instead, we made the villager hold the axe above their head a bit longer, before slowly increasing in speed (as if the weight of the axe was helping in adding power) to the final frames of action.
I will most likely revisit this animation again to fix the timing and add more anticipation in the action when I finish with the rest of the animations.
The death animation was one of my more favorite actions to do. It used a lot of exaggeration and follow through principles, along with a bit of slow in and slow out. I exaggerated the stumble/ weariness of the villager, making the spin larger and wider, while having the body be the lead and the head follow. At the beginning of each exaggeration, I tried to slow down the movements there, before quickening it. This is more clearly seen during the start of the forward fall and the start of the collapse.
What made this animation fun to me was the acting I had to do, which involved me falling a lot on the floor in different positions before settling for one.
I also modeled, rigged, and animated the enemy boar that the villagers would be hunting.
It was difficult to get the running of the boar to look normal. I had a lot of trouble with the timing of how long it would be in the air for, along with the “spring” it had when entering the air.
Overall, the animations are all somewhat complete at base level. I need to continue to refine and polish the movements. Sadly, I need to finish the environmental models and several more animations before I can go back and edit them all.
For now, we have placeholders that can also work for our final game should I be unable to finish the models.