This week, one of the things that I have worked on is the fire-animation for our avatar from Flight of the Giraffa. I’m not very comfortable with animation so taking on this task was interesting. Animating is new unexplored ground for me, I’ve done some small sprite animations but haven’t really got the hang of it.
Animating in photoshop using high-resolution pictures isn’t very easy either. Much more complicated than using programs like adobe flash. You have to use separate layers for every keyframe in photoshop and there isn’t any intuitive way to arrange them easy. Because of this the layers tab become cluttered very easily. You have to be very organized so you won’t get lost in your layers tab. This was by far my biggest difficulty when doing this animation. It was hard to know which keyframes the layers where visible in.
I used and old picture of the avatar as an template for the animation, and worked my way from there. Firstly I asked my self how would a giraffe shoot bullets from it’s head? The eyes or the mouth would be pretty obvious choices but since our avatar has an bubble helmet I couldn’t use the eyer or the mouth. Then it hit me, the horns! The avatars horns does extrude from the helmet. Therefore I choose them as the outlet for our avatars massive amount of energy.
I made them wobble forth and back to give the player a little feedback for firing with the avatar. I also made the eyes scrunch back and forth to make the animation have a little more expression than just the horns wobbling back and forth.
I’m relatively happy with how the ani
mation turned out at the end, there’s room for improvement, make it more fluid, create even more expression in her face. The animation is separated from the rest of the body to make it eaiser for the head to aim at the enemies and look around. Overall this task has been really interesting and I’ve become much more efficient at animating in photoshop. This would’ve been much more easy to do in flash or any other program that is designed to animate in. In the future I will work more on the individual animations to make them more believable. I will use more time to finish and work on my animations, my familiarity with animations has definitely increased and I’m looking forward to doing more!
Theo Bengtsson
yumtasticness 