Collab Project 3- Day 46

I made a bird. I call him Flick.

Also today is the last day, but as far as I'm aware I have done the stuff I need to do.

Collab Project 3- Day 45

Mike wants me to adjust the jump animation a touch. I'm also working on a bird for us to have fly around the level, just to add some nice detail to it.

Collab Project 3- Day 43

I have my portfolio interview for Wolverhampton Uni tomorrow, so I've been spending pretty much all of today doing the last few tweaks to my portfolio.

Collab Project 3- Day 42

So the colouring is now done.

Step 4

Next is to put the layers into frame in Photoshop to see how the final animation looks.

Step 5

 And this I how it turned out.

Now the final step, to save all the frames seperately for Mike to use in Construct2.

And that's a character animation done. This is the sixth I've done for the character and should be the last one I need to do. I think Mike wants me to tweak a couple of the previous ones though.

Collab Project 3- Day 39

Having done the jump animation, I believe all that is needed for the main character is a death animation. I'm going to try and show the whole process I go through for my animations since I've only shown bits so far.

Step 1

I start in Photoshop. Photoshop allows you to have both animation frames and layers. When trying to animate in GIMP2, your frames are your layers so it can be quite awkward to do. I add in a frame from one of my previous animations for a bit of a guide.

Next I try to sketch out the animation. This can take a while to get right, so I check with Laura and Mike to see what they think. Some animations can take longer than others to do, simply because it can take a while during the sketch stage to get things to look right.
Sometimes I'll repeat the frames at the end of an animation when showing it to the others. This is because the animation loops continuously so adding more frames gives a small pause at the end.

Step 2

This is the animation thus far:

 Next I'll take this over to Paint Tool SAI, a program I use alot at home. I like using Sai, it's quite easy to use and for this protect I use the vector tool that Sai has. This makes nice smooth lines that I can click and move around, so editing and tweaking the animation is easy.
Plus it accepts and exports .pdf's, so I can easily switch between Sai and Photoshop. Sai doesn't have the ability to animate so I switch between the two programs frequently to check how the animation looks.
In Sai, I first start with just black lining the sketch.

Step 3

By using a technique called onion skinnning, in which I lower the opacity of each of the frames, I can see all the frevious to the one I'm working on. Exported back into photoshop to animate, the black lines look like this:

After another check with the others, I'll start to add colour. I can add colour in either program, but I tend to use Sai. If the animation ever needs eiting at a later date I'll do so in Sai, so having the colour in Sai would save me having to re-colour each frame in photoshop every time.

Collab Project 3- Day 38

Finished jump animation. I just need to save the seperate frames for Mike.

Collab Project 3- Day 36

I black lined the jump animation which is ready to be coloured

WIP

Collab Project 3- Day 35

Today I worked on a jumping animation for the character.

These are the frames for the animation in an arc to show how it would look jumping while moving forward.

Collab Project 3- Day 32

I coloured in the running animation. I just have to go through it now and save all the frames seperately.

I made some platforms and ground for Mike to use.

Collab Project 3- Day 31

I compared the running animation to the others and I could see what ws wrong. The character in the running animation was taller and thiner in compariosn to the others. I need to go through the frames and resize and edit them so they match the others better.

Here's the finished lines for the running animation that I'll colour tommorow. I reallt like this animation, I feel it turned out very good.

Collab Project 3- Day 29

I used Paint Tool SAI again to line the base I made yesterday, something seems a little off with it. I need to tweek it on Thursday and see what I can do to fix it.

Collab Project- Day 28

Mike asked if I could try a running animation as he thought the walking may be too slow for the game.

As a base I made this 7 frame run cycle

Collab Project 3- Day 25

I finished off the attack animation today.

This the three animations I've made over the last two weeks, put into one. I made this try try and get an idea how the three would look all together in game.