Douglas Flinders

While I’m happy with the outcome I did fall victim to some poor project management. While I got a bulk of the work done early I was reluctant to blog it as I new I would have to tackle screen capture which I’ve had a fair few problems with in the past. Due to this I never really had anything to post online for feedback which I very much regret as I no doubt could have improved my work considerably with more input from others. I will certainly make a much greater effort to document my work as I go in future as the final stages of the project did become extremely stressful due to the volume of work that required recording and documenting.

Lastly Here’s the landing blendspace to complete the full jump. I’m actually surprised how well these transition since there movements are very different, the midway point still looks fairly natural and believable which is useful since it may well end up being the most seen version of the land.

Here is the blendspace for the Looping or falling segment. while similar I tried to make an effort to capture more of the momentum in the forward travelling version with the leaning and larger arcs for the limbs.

I created a new blendspace for each of the jump segments so I can create the natural transition depending on the characters speed. This is the blend space for the two jump starts. As you can see the first is much more upright while the second is leaning forward with a much greater sense of momentum and force. 

Here’s a quick video showing the final idle to sprint blendspace. I re-baked and exported all of the animations individually again and imported them into unreal. I think it’s looking better than before, theres a lot more detail in the actions and everything feels more natural. I like the varition between the run and sprint now and theres some nice cycles created in the transitional areas between them all.

For the land section I wanted a lot more force since the character would be hitting the floor at speed so went for a drop motion having the character catch himself on all fours for a second before returning to a sprinting pose. I’m pretty happy with the final thing and I’m eager to see how it looks in engine, I’m hopeful it will look decent and bypass the odd floaty look from before.

I also added a bit more recovery time into the landing to make it feel a bit more impactful.

I then also revisited the legs which needed some considerable adjustments. The key changes made were to his feet, making sure they pulled up a lot faster and higher than before so there was more time off the ground. I also adjusted the angle of his feet as they lifted so they looked more natural and smoother along with the hip movements to lift the leg as it came up.

I didn't feel that the sprint needed a whole lot of work so only touched a few bits. I added a tiny bit of head bob as I had with the others. I tweaked the legs again as I had tended to keep the legs pointing apart to much throughout all the animations. I also added some hip and shoulder twisting to exaggerate the rest of the bodies movement as it had been a bit too stiff before.

Here is a clip of the updated walk. I was pretty happy with where it was so most of the changes where simply smoothing out the movement and going into the graph editor to clean everything up. I added a slight bob to the head and as I had done with the run put in a bit more shoulder movement to make it look a bit more natural.

The main change I wanted to make however was to the arms, rather than pumping straight up and down like they did currently I wanted to give them a bit more of a swinging arc. The main way I achieved this feeling was tilting his hands round so they had a bit more drag on them, I also had them linger at the top point in front of him for longer to exaggerate this drag effect. I then had to do a lot of tweaking to the elbow angle and fingers to get them to support the new action. Overall I think I managed to get more of the fun look I was aiming for and it will hopefully be more distinguished from the sprint animation when transitioning in game.

Lastly I added some more motion to the shoulders and chest to exaggerate his breathing a bit and get a more natural looking movement. I think it’s looking a lot better now especially when compared to the energy of his other movements. This clip unfortunately adds a slight pop at the pinnacle of his breath in due to the nature of the loop but it is actually smooth when a single breath is looped on it’s own.

Heres a video showcasing the animations in game. I feel like they work decently together, while there are obviously little to no transitions between them the fast snappy nature of the controls kind of makes up for this and stops it from being a huge problem. We will be continuing work on this over the summer so I hope to fix up some of the visual implementation of the game such as having a different way to indicate the currently selected robot other than the red overlay and possibly tweaking the cameras zoom length to show the detail of each robot a bit better.

Next was using the same silhouettes to create a shading pass done in 3 tones, the untouched areas that would be left at full brightness a half shaded area which had a reduced opacity layer applied and the full shaded areas. I feel that this gave a decent 3D effect to the character and allowed for some decent form definition. I opted for large shaded areas to mimic a distinct light source.

Overall I’m really pleased with how the full set turned out, I was slightly worried I had chosen poorly when I decided to to a set of animations where each frame was individually drawn however using a mixture of flash to get the motion roughed out with a sketch and then rendering them in photoshop with the lasso tool sped up this process massively and allowed me to work a lot quicker then I expected. 

Since your robots had to gather resources we needed an extracting animation of some sort. I played around with a few ideas from mining with a pickaxe to something laser related but eventually settled on the drill idea. As time was starting to run out at this point I didn’t manage to get quite as many frames in as I would’ve liked however I still think the action is very clear and has a decent amount of ridiculous exaggeration to it. I would've liked to get more side to side movement of the whole thing but I decided to settle for the up and down movement seen here.

However I still feel that this does a decent job at conveying the characters motion only looking very out of place when the character is moving directly up or down with zero sideways motion. I feel like I maybe could’ve exaggerated the spring in his step giving him a higher mid point with more time off the ground to match the over the top cartoony style but I still feel that it does an ok job. And once again animating the springy antenna on top of his head was a lot of fun and I think helps give the animation a lot more character.