New Tricks Up My Sleeve

It's not everyday that you get to innovate new techniques in your craft, especially in pixel art animation. Although it's not true to the art style when animated, it's still just as fun for me to make. What we have here is yet another progress update on some of the personal content that I make on my spare time.

One technique for character rigging is to do turn-around's of each rig part. For me, this makes it so that you mix and match parts to get poses that you need in almost any view whatsoever in a 2D space. This can also create different perspectives of the characters in different shots, rather than it looking in a mere 2D space and manipulate it into somewhat of a 2.5D space. And since the sprites themselves are of a very small canvas size, the intent of making a diverse set of parts to use is quite easy to accomplish.

For some spoilers, the animation that I've been making here is a showcase of the character that you see in the image. You see that he's wear a suit of armor, yes? Me personally, I like to entertain the thought if this warrior were to fight with his fists rather than a simple sword and shield. I would like to give the atmosphere of this animation similar to what you would feel when watching a fighting game of some sort, given that the art itself is video-game-like.

However, I won't be getting to work on it for a bit, for I am heading out on a trip to Oregon for a small vacation to get away from things. There's just simply too much to juggle around at the moment. Even though I've gotten used to how things are now, one needs a break somewhere in all of it, right?

Turning Character Art into a Rig - Part 2

 At last, another step forward into our pre-production process to our "Eko Project"! What you see in the images of this blog contain the parts made for our character rig and the them being implemented into Adobe After Effects. For my first experiment, I will try and see if can make this still, standing character and make her run in a full and seamless cycle.

The whole process itself requires very meticulous planning and mapping, for I have to break the character down and rebuild it again in order for me to animate her. The reference I use for the walk cycle is from Richard William's Animator's Survival Kit. Because this is merely an experiment, it will allow our team to obtain additional information on how to go about the final designs of the character and the rig itself. As a fun fact, the art itself only took a single weekend for our digital artist. This counts the lineart, color, and shading!

The character rig itself consists of around 20 parts or so, with the head by itself having about 10 parts to rig for facial expressions and hair movement. To save time, the arms and legs for both sides have been duplicated and mostly consist of one color to save the details such as fingers at a later design. Despite having my foot in the door in starting the experiment, my everyday schedule will continue to impede the rate of progress made from day to day. Perhaps when school happens to give me a break.

However, this week is quite generous in giving me additional time to do things. So I definitely look forward to take advantage of that. Perhaps I can actually finish this within the week? Who knows?

Turning Character Art into a Rig - Part 1

Happy day! This week, our team has created a draft version--when I say "draft", it's basically a concept still in the works--of our protagonist for our short film! I work in tandem with our main digital artist and help her understand exactly how to format the character's body and prepare it for rigging. This is her attempt in mapping it out and it look pretty elaborate as far as the layers go. However, this isn't exactly a bad thing either.

The more layers I have, the more I can work with. Meaning I can obtain more parts for the rig and make the character animation more complex. I've yet to touch anything within the .PSD of this file, though I do have a plan in mind.

My intention will be to save each of the rig part individually and rebuild our character in a separate program. Possibly in After Effects to save time and frustration. I will then do simple animation like walking, standing idly, and emotional reactions. In addition to body parts for the character, her face will have the most parts to animation in a single space. Her blinking, eyes moving, ears twitching, all of these details will be important in discovering more about our character's erm... character.

This endeavor may suffer some delays as things within my work, school, and personal life have been heating up. No need to fret, for it's nothing negative. It's simply obligations that take too much of my time and I tend to spoil myself rotten with procrastination in my free time. I hope things will clear up in a reasonable amount of time and I can get back on this right away!