Douglas Flinders

@douglasflinders

Third Year: Creative Research Computer Arts Practice Spacial Constructs

363 posts

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UooeRrnD0hQ)

Here is my final Submission video of the character in game. I’m really happy with how the project has turned out, I’ve learnt a ton about both animating for games and becoming more familiar with unreal 4 and the blueprints system. I think the final animations all work pretty well together, I’m really glad I went back and made the changes to the jump that I did as I feel it looks a lot better than before with the new leaping take off and landing. I managed to setup the blendspace to work based on the characters speed using the same setup the idle to run uses. While it’s still using elements I picked up in the tutorial I feel like I at least understand the procedures I was following and have shown this by implementing my own changes to the setup.

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.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Ly8NxTVgY)

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.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MVJkOnG-JQ)

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.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk7hpl3DTlU)

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.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz-a_buWPc4)

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.

Here is the second version of the jump with a lot of forward momentum. I’ll hopefully be able to setup a blend between the previous one and this one so that unreal will transition between them depending on how fast my character is travelling when he jumps.

I tried to start off in a sprinting position since that’s the pose my character would be in when moving fast. I opted for a single foot take off into the leap, I feel like this works out decently and transitions fairly well into the looping section. For the falling segment I tried to make the action a bit more extreme and energetic since he would be flying through the air rather than just dropping down. I generally made the arm and leg arcs larger and more frantic.

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 realized that my biggest problem with the jump was that fact that it didn’t take into account the movement of the character at all sine I had created the animation with a stationary take off and landing in mind. Because of this I decided to create two separate version of each jump one stationary and one travelling forwards. I will hopefully then be able to setup a blend space for each part using the same blueprints that the idle to run is using and get unreal to blend between both depending on how fast the character is travelling while jumping.

In order to do this I first had to polish up the old jump making it a lot smoother and cleaning up the motion of the arms and the legs. I reduced the amount of vertical flailing in the arms since it felt to high up for a natural falling cycle. Although I wanted the animation to be fairly exaggerated I had to be sure to only exaggerate the right parts to avoid it looking odd.

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

The crouched Idle changed very little so it doesn't seem worth posting the video, the crawl however needed a decent amount of clean up and fixing. I decided to straighten him out since the previous animation had been skewed to one side but this ended up feeling odd since his movement was straight forward. I still kept a decent amount of sway in his body but this time ensured it went to both sides as he put his weight onto each arm one at a time.

There was a fair amount of cleanup required for the hands as they previously clipped through the floor a lot and generally lacked a solid sense that they were supporting weight. I still think they feel slightly weak in this sense but they’re definitely better than before.

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.

Here is the polished up run animation. Since I had added the sprint animation after the run I decided to make the run a little more bouncy and fun. I added a some side to side movement to the head giving it a more bouncy feeling. I also added some twist into the hips and shoulders so they lead their limbs a bit better helping to make the swing of the arms and legs read better. The legs themselves were also a bit too widely spaced and so i adjusted the feet and knee angle to be more suitable.

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.

After having a ton of fun working on the 2D robot animations I wanted to revisit each of my 3D animation and try to polish them up adding a bit more of the exaggerated fun style I used with the robot. First I went back to the Idle I had also been to see Lynn Parker and got some awesome feedback and advice for each of the animations.

She recommended I try to add a bit more of a dip with the hip to make more sense of the rest of the characters movements as they was currently a bit too much swing in the arms for how little he dipped. I also tried to fix the head bob slightly making it a bit smoother as well as generally smoothing out as much of the movements as I could, going into the graph editor of each shape and making sure nothing stood out as too harsh. I added a tiny bit of movement to the fingers and fixed the thumbs swing to be in time with the arms making him feel less stiff.

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.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj8kfx4iaIQ)

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.

Above is a breakdown of the process used to create all of the robot animations. I first did a very rough line sketch version in flash. This allowed me to mess around and get the movement feeling right in a very quick form where I could quickly erase things and move things round without worrying about how messy it was.

Once I had something I was happy with most of the hard work was pretty much done it was then just a case of bringing it into photoshop and rendering each frame. I first created a full silhouette around each of the sketchy frames using the polygon lasso tool. I then blocked in the different areas of colour tring to adhere to the design I had made and think about how the different patterns and shapes would deform as he moved.

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.

The last animation I created was the death, this was needed for when one of your robots ran out of juice. I decided to have the robot fade to a slightly darker less saturated tone as it died to the dead robots on screen would be easy to distinguish. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out given the time I had left to do it. I wanted to get at least a little bit of weight into it with the accelerating fall and little bounce at the end.

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.

This was the second animation created. Since the game was essentially isometric I originally planned to do a 4 way directional run with this side animation being used for left and right movement and then a separate run up and down animation. Unfortunately due to time constraints I never managed to create the other runs as it was deemed more important to get the other actions in.

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.

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