Weekly Blog Post

For this week’s blog assignment I thought I would tell you about the idle animation I created.

We decided that we wanted to have an idle animation before the Alpha-presentation tomorrow as it would look better than having her moving all the time.  Before starting I thought it would probably be really easy compared to the animations I have previously created but I had a really hard time getting started. I found that it is easier to move arms and legs to make it look like someone is moving, than making the body look like it is moving while standing still.

I started with some fast doodling and trying to think of how the character would move. One thing I thought of was putting her hand on her hip but I felt that is probably something you would rather do when in a more comfortable situation and I did not want her to look like she is comfortable and relaxed as it conflicts with our aesthetic goals. Instead I tried to imagine her nervous, maybe leaning forwards and looking around; it felt like it could become irritating for the player though. I figured that from a player’s perspective it would probably be most appreciated if she did not move too much, especially since she is supposed to be able to stand idle when hiding behind things, if I were the player I would not be happy if an idle animation was the reason that the guards found me.

That led me to experiment with her standing still, swinging slightly from side to side – unfortunately, that looked more like jiggle physics than anything else, which is not really what we are looking for. 

Finally I decided that I would at least start with letting her just stand there and breathe. The biggest challenge with this was to make it look natural and avoid sexualizing the character; we are looking for something other than cleavage and jiggle physics for “Terminal”. With this in mind I carefully moved her shoulders back and her chest slightly forwards, simulating taking a breath. I wanted the animation to be fluid and therefore wanted several frames; this was an additional challenge since I wanted to be very careful with the amount of movement.

The finished animation consists of four frames, it does look fluid but it also looks as if she is breathing rather heavily. That actually works with our idea of incorporating stamina; the player will be able to hear her breath getting louder as her fatigue increases.

What I would do different is probably, again, reference photos – lots and lots of them, studying someone who is not doing anything from above and filming would probably also be a good idea. The perspective offers a lot of challenges as it is not how you usually look at the world and can therefore be hard to visualize.