Creating the animations for the Synpotic Project was hard, as animating isn't one of my strong points. My other weakness is that I don't have a lot of experience with using After Effects to animate. Thankfully, I managed to figure it out, and I made the first few animations.
The animation I started with was the walk cycle for the samurai. This is easily the worst animation of the lot, as it was the first one I attempted. I also over-anticipated how slow a walk cycle needed to be, so it came out a little slow.
I started out by combining all the layers in the groups in Photoshop, which made each body part solid, and then imported them into After Effects as separate layers. It was then a case of setting up the rigs. I did this by moving the anchor points of the different limbs, and then parenting them to each other until the hips had full control. I did this for each of the characters before I started animating.
Then I imported the referent I would be using and got to work animating. I use keyframes for the rotation of each item to move them, instead of actually changing the position. Since the Samurai's walk cycle was the first thing I animated, I had no idea how it would turn out. I started by making sure my reference would move at a good speed, so that I could go through the frames until the Samurai matched to a position and move his limbs around.
I had a few problems with the scale of the samurai compared to the proportions of the reference I chose, but it's an understandable issue, since the characters for the Synoptic Project are in a cartoony style instead of a realistic one.
In the end, the first animation turned out rather clunky, but this could be seen as the Samurai struggling under the armour he's wearing. I think this is a hilarious explanation, since he's supposed to be a fearsome obstacle that results in an instant game over if he sees the player.
Samurai walk cycle:
The next animation I made was Aki's run cycle. This was also an important one, but I wanted to warm up my skills in After Effects before I attempted this one. The reference I used for this one was from a Batman sprite sheet, which is a cartoon style run, with over exaggerated movements. This is the perfect reference, but I knew there would be some issues with it.
One of the main problems I had with the previous animation was that the samurai is at a 3/4 angle. Walk and run cycles tend to be draw out from a side view of a person, which means that some things won't look right when I animated them on the characters. Despite this, the animations serve their purposes, and it's clear what each of them are.
After creating this animation, I realised what the problem was with both the cycles I'd made. By moving each limb to wherever the it was positioned on the reference, it was becoming clunky. To create a smoother walk and run cycle I would need to have less keyframes interfering with the movement, which would improve the flow.
This is the longest animation I made, and I'm proud that it didn't take too much time to make. This animation really made me see that having a good flow in a character's movement is hard to achieve.
Aki run cycle:
The next animation I made was the jump animation for Aki. Since parkouring is an important part of the game, it was only right that this one should come next. I decided not to work directly from a reference, but to try and animate something by myself. I still looked at different jump cycles from other games, but I didn't want to copy those.
Since Aki is a Ninja, his jumping style would be different from a lot of others. I wanted to show that he was a ninja from his jumping style. I tried to animate him with his knees up to his chest, but this ended up not looking right. Instead, I settled on having him keeping his legs straight while jumping. To build up the jump, I made sure his back is bent and his legs and getting ready to spring him upwards. I also made sure to bend his legs when he lands, to add a layer of realism to my animations.
Aki jump:
The last animation I did is by far the best. Because the other core game mechanic at the time was having the ability to crouch and go into different area, this was the animation I worked on next.
Because I needed to work with a smaller space, I created a box in MS Paint to use as a guide to how small I had to get Aki. I also used this for the jumping animation, but it wasn't as useful. I also had no reference for this animation, as a 'crouch cycle' isn't something most games have. Even games like 'Metroid', which has a similar mechanic that allows the player to enter smaller spaces, opted to transform the character into a ball, which is a much simpler animation.
I started with putting the legs into their starting positions and then reversing them at the end of the animation. All I had to do was make sure the legs stayed within the box, and then do the same with the arms. This animation definitely has the most flow out of all the ones I've done, which is ironic, since it was the only animation I didn't have any form of reference for.
Some of the things I made sure I did for this animation was tilt Aki's back downward and his head upward, while also giving a bit of a jitter in his back, following his legs. I also made sure to move Jing's head side to side so that it didn't look like her head was attached to his shoulder. This also makes the animation more interesting.
Aki couching cycle:
With all these animations done, it's made me more confident about creating the rest. I've learnt that getting a good flow of motion in a character's movement is important. It's been a trial-and-error process, but the animations I made in After Effects have made me more comfortable with animating with it.
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