Death

Last week I finally finished the death animation for the main character in "Terminal", this turned out to be quite a challenge. I found it very difficult imagining how one would fall when dying and I did some sketches of how she might look when lying on the floor. I thought about googleing "dead girl" but I was afraid of what I would see so I just had to use my imagination.

I had one "death pose" that I liked although I could not figure out a good way for her to get there, I thought that she should first fall to her knees and then backwards. It just did not look right so I had to rethink everything; this is the very first test I made, just to see if the movement pattern would work, it was, as said, not very successful.

I tried imagining how one would react and discussed it with some of my team members, we came to a conclusion that it would probably be more realistic if she would lean forwards as one does when in danger, instinctively protecting the abdomen. She would still fall on her knees, maybe stay there for just a second and then falling forwards to the side.

The part of her falling to her knees was improved from the previous test and reused, so I had a starting point and a new death pose for the end, again it was a real challenge of how to get her there, much due to the top down perspective.
The first iteration of the new animation had few frames, so that I could see if this would work and it looked like this.

This felt like a good start so I kept working on it, adding more frames for the in-betweens to get a fluid motion. I did have some issues with the perspective and I had to rework all the frames a few times so that she would get proportionally smaller so that it would look like she is falling to the floor, away from the camera. When I felt satisfied with the animation I added her clothing on top, constantly fixing small things to keep it flowing.

Next thing I did was to add her braid, this was also a big challenge that I had to reiterate several times before it looked okay. I tried figuring out how it would move, when hair is gathered in a braid it gets a tad stiff and heavy although it should still move. At one point I did try braiding my hair and running around to see how much it moved, I believe during the creation of the run animation, and it did not move that much although for my animations I had to exaggerate the movement for it to look good.

After too many hours of work I finished the animation with colour and here is the result

If I was to do something differently I could probably add some more frames, it is made up of 13 frames, and perhaps redo the braid again but I am happy with how it turned out.