Hi guys!
So this week I have continued to work with my enemy animations and I have also animated our power up icon animation. But in this post I will be writing about the falcon enemy type animation, which is finally (!!) done and I am halfway done with the next one.
In last week’s post I wrote about the struggles I had whilst working in Adobe Animate. I could not get the wings to bend properly and I briefly tried to learn Toon Boom Harmony 12, but gave up and continued in Animate. However, During the weekend, I gave Toon Boom another shot and actually succeeded. However, I totally underestimated the time required to do frame by frame animation from sketch to clean up to a complete animation.
During the sprint planning I estimated that it would take me two hours to finish the animation. It took me 15. Safe to say I have not slept much this week.
I ran in to a lot of different problems with this animation, apart from working in a completely new program. The first problem I encountered was the proper movement of the wings. It took me a bit of research to properly understand how wings work. There is a lot of YouTube tutorials on it, however I found that this simple picture explained it best.
So once I had the wing movement done I did a rough sketch of the animation. After that I cleaned it up, and finally I made sure that the line art was tight.
The next problem was that I wanted the animation to be perfectly smooth. I was up in 24 individual key frames when my lead programmer told me to calm down and cut the frame count in half. So I did but instead of twelve I went for 16 frames. And realized that I could have saved up to 3 hours of work if I would have accepted that it does not have to be pitch perfect all the time.
The next step was to add color. It took me some time to decide the colors but as soon as that was done it all went rather quickly. I would really like to add some shadows. But that will have to wait until after the beta.
The final problem was that I can not seem to find any good ways to export my animations. But I am working on a solution fot that.
So even though this animation has been a never ending nightmare consuming 2 weeks of my life it is finally over and I learned a lot. Also the next two enemy animations will be a walk in the park, seeing as I now know how to and not to do a good animation. An I can also use the falcon animation as a template for the others.
So here you can se my process from start to finish.
The final animation looks better then this one but I could only extract it as an swf, which wordpress does not support. So in order to show off I had to reduce the quality by going through converters.