animation | Boma's CGA Sketchbook

Character animation draft

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Boma

I experimented with rigging and animations with our current character model. In doing this I was fully prepared to recreate each animation in case something went wrong with the rig, so there were essentially a draft.

I created a custom rig and animated the following:

An idle ‘float’ animation to use as a base for other animations

anim2 anim4_1

A hurt pose (returns to the default float animation after duration)

anim3

A shooting animation

anim1

A strafe animation

anim4_2

Doing these tests brought some issues to light and gave me some knowledge the was useful for the final product.

anim5_shoulderandelbowmovementdocumentthissss

HumanIK is a more efficient way of rigging human models
Without using weight painting the model deforms and bends in places it shouldn’t.
The model should be textured before advancing with rigging and animation
Something is wrong with the import method that was used, as these were some of the final imported results:

why imsofuckingdone

Knowing that I needed to start from scratch, I started by seeing if I could use the transform attribute tool to transfer the vertex values of the fully UV mapped model.

transfer_attributes

After an unsuccessful attempt I decided it would be best to just start again with newly obtained knowledge and some good practice.

Glitch effect test using After Effects

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Boma

I got the Twitch plugin for Adobe After Effects and decided to apply it to the pixel version of our title as a test.

I plan to do this to png snapshots of certain assets, and then attach an animated png sequence of the end result as an overlay for certain enemies to show that they are more glitchy and volatile.

Doing this test made me realise that it visually works quite well for the title screen, but it may not make sense to apply it as Project Ikarus is supposed to be the antivirus program of the game world. It very much fits with the theme of our game so I’ll get some outside opinions on this soon.

Alien bug animation

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Boma

alienbug01

Someone from our modelling team made an alien bug for the map for me to animate. Since it wasn’t rigged I had to learn how to rig myself, I got the hang of the very basics but I couldn’t get the fangs to move without distorting the head unfortunately, I was still happy with the end result though since I’ve never animated four-legged creatures before.

Cardboard box animation

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Boma

Just like the fans, this cardboard box is being affected by the wind as well. It is already distorted because of the climate and the subtle wind animation helps to further imply this. For this I just rigged the edges of the box with two joints each.

1200 frames

Fan animations

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Boma

We were adding fans for certain rooms but due to the setting there isn’t any running electricity, so all the movement would have to be based off natural wind. I made these animations of fans being blown by natural gusts of wind, I tried to make the movements inconsistent within the loops due to the unpredictability of wind.

2000 frames

This next fan is supposed to be dirty and jittery because of overgrowing, so I made the way it stops a bit more sudden, but subtle at the same time. I didn’t want to make it too rigid otherwise it would be too noticeable and stand out.

4000 frames

The same concept as the first fan applies to this one.

1200 frames

Drone animation

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Boma

We wanted to have an alien drone scouring the map, but it would look out of place and static without any animations. The rigging was done for me and then I was able to start animating it.

drone01

Before I started I researched jellyfish and octopus tentacle movements to get a feel of what I needed to successfully recreate natural tentacle movement.

I animated the parts of each of the tentacles from the outermost part first (eg. the tip first, then the next joint, then the innermost joint)

This is the collective graph data for each joint:

I made sure every graph line started and ended on the exact same value so that I would get a perfect loop, and it was successful.

Final result:

I think to make this better I would have to learn how to rig it myself and add more joints so the tentacles would flow more naturally, as you can see how it is with the mouth.