Sneak

*Note: For the weekly blog assignment read the run post*

As usual this week has been very busy so far, and the worst is not yet over. Since we have a deadline Friday I decided to take on doing a sneak animations, two aiming animations and two shooting animations, I was hesitant as it is a lot of work to do in the little time we have, however it has to be done. It would have been hard work getting it done and as expected a lot of other things have come along. Yesterday we started with a lecture in character design and then we gathered in our group to design our first level. We also had some things that needed to be worked on in our scrum document, so I was asked to sort out the items-list and the deadline dates.

I started with counting how many deadlines we had for each day, separating art/code/etc so I would get an overview of our current schedule. Then I started to redistribute deadlines more evenly and prioritize where necessary. When finished I looked over it again and repeated the process until I was satisfied, I made sure no deadlines were due on a day of testing and tried to avoid them the day before such dates where possible. I also made sure we had very few deadlines the week before and only one during the final week since I want our team to be finished with production since we will be very busy with testing and fixing things. that will also give us a little space for those things that will need to be added later. This took me a few hours yesterday and a couple more this midmorning, I also managed to get started on one of the aiming animations yesterday although it is only a rough sketch at the moment, trying to map out the proportions.

After lunch today I started on the sneaking animation, first i thought I would try to finish the aiming and shooting first, since they are easier and less time consuming, meaning that I could spend the rest of the week on the sneak-animation. Since we are considering using the sneak animation for walking and aiming we decided it would probably be better to get it done first.

Soon I realized that I was right in thinking it would be difficult, as usual I tried to ask Google for "woman sneaking" and as usual it was not very helpful since I was not looking for pictures of women eating, that is however a different discussion. Sneaking is not something I normally do so it was difficult to imagine and feeling the movement pattern and we all tried to figure it out and then went on with taking more reference photos.

After many hours of work I managed to get something that at least looks like sneaking, although I had big problems getting the arm movement right and working with the leg movement. I had to redo the arms many times before being satisfied, no I have to get some movement into the body and head aswell and then I can go on to refining and cleaning up.

I have only been working on the arms and legs so it is a bit stiff looking at the moment.