It took me much longer than anticipated to finish these animations because there were weeks where I had to devote all my time to my thesis, and CTN and Thanksgiving took up a lot of time. Each animation actually took me about 1 to 2 days to finish.
I really learned a lot about animating for video games while doing these animations!
I really learned a lot about animating for video games while doing these animations!
- For the run cycle, that was my first time really trying to aim for a cartoony timing.
- For the idle animation I had to find a balance between it moving too much and not enough. In video games, the idle animation tends to be very exaggerated to the point where you almost can't have the character moving too much. But since I was looking to the Ratchet and Clank series as inspiration, I knew that most 3rd person shooters or platformers wouldn't have very exaggerated idle animations (as compared to say, fighting games) so I had to tone it down a bit while making sure that it reads from a 3rd person perspective.
- The double jump was pretty challenging and I feel like in order to animate it better, I need to talk to an animator who works in games to ask how exactly you would animate something like that (since the player controls the timing of the second jump). I had a lot of fun designing the movement of the landing though, and I got to test out a way to make rotations cleaner and smoother that I learned from Michal Makarewicz.
- The dive/ dodge also required me to think a lot about the timing as it pertains to video games. Since it is a dodge, the animation has to be performed as soon as the button is pressed so I knew I couldn't have too much anticipation. I also had a lot of fun sculpting the arc of the jump and using the controls in the arms and legs to make them curve along the arc.
- The melee attack was by far my favorite animation to do! It was very challenging for many reasons. First of all, adding any sort of constraints adds many factors and thus many chances for things to go very wrong. Luckily nothing went wrong with my constraints because I used very clean methods when setting it up. On top of that, my character rotates the staff within the hand that it is constrained to but since I set up the constraints cleanly, it was pretty easy to do. Another thing that was uniquely challenging was tracing the arcs. Since the staff moves in 3D space, I had to track the arcs in 3D space by creating spheres and placing them at each end of the staff for each frame. It was awesome seeing how the animation instantly became more visually appealing once the arcs were nice and smooth.
- One thing I learned from these animations overall is that you really have to be much more critical of where your character is moving in space since the player has the freedom to move the camera wherever they want in 3rd person games. I frequently played the animation from different angles and orthographic views to make sure it looked nice from every angle. I also had to be very conscious of what axis my characters are moving in because the player needs to predict where the animation is going to take their character - especially in a 3rd person platformer. This requires conscious set up in the beginning of your blocking to make sure that your character only moves along one axis (x or z).
Reference for the melee attack: