Week 8

This week I have made very slow progress with my animation due to big deadlines in other modules like Applied Game Art Project which we had a major Alpha deadline which we had to make sure we hit. So majority of the week has been spent on that.

Where am I up so far with this module? I have 3 animations pretty much done, with some like the walk cycle needing a few tweaks here and there. My final 4th animation I have started, the idea for the animation has changed slightly. Originally I was going to have my ninja character walking then turning when he hears a noise and pulls out his sword. However I felt that have the character walking then turning was going to be tricky to animate. So the plan is now to have the ninja character pull out his sword while in his idle pose. This animation will still take place before the opening the window animation. I feel this will be an easier animation to get done seeing how much time we have left to get every thing done in our groups.

When looking back at some of my previous animations like the walk cycle for the ninja, I felt that the animation could do with a few tweaks. For example when the foot is about to make contact with the floor with one of my characters legs it seems very rush and clunky. While watching the stop motion film ParaNorman, I noticed a key piece of animation that could really help me. I managed to break the couple seconds of animation into screen shots showing the up close walk cycle. Here this demonstrates how when his feet are about to make contact with the ground, he leads with the heel and the toes curl up. Whereas in my walk cycle the character feet at one stage just goes straight down. However once this minor tweak has been made, I'm pretty happy with how that piece of animation looks.

Here is what my final animation looks like so far rendered. There's still a lot more work to be done to the animation however I'm liking the way it's turning out so far.