With the 3D character models now completed, our upcoming phase: animation⭐.

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I’m responsible for directing our 3D animator in animating the MC, creatures, and NPCs, while ensuring all movements are fluid and realistic, without causing the phone to heat up and explode. It’s a balancing act between authenticity and efficiency, and that’s where the enjoyment (and the feedback loops) start!

 

Here is a compilation of a bunch of animations, and how they differed from the first draft to the second draft after feedback:

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Each group comes with its own set of rules:

⚔️The MC is our little puppet, it needs to feel generally satisfying to control and every movement has to feel as fun and dynamic as possible while still being grounded. Most of our time has gone to tweaking attack animations, recieving impact animations, and running.

🐛Monsters are where we can get a little weirder. We want them to move in unsettling ways while also remaining real(The centipede animation was the biggest struggle, solely because it was very icky to animate and to look at in general, WE HAD TO RESEARCH REFERENCE PICS! :( ). When it came to their death sequence and attacks, we wanted them to appear generally satisfying and rewarding to strike by increasing the amount of impact they face when being hit by the MC

🗣️NPCs are more subtle. But we wanted to make sure they still fill out the spaces in the environment by grounding their movements while keeping a sense of dynamics. Each NPC was also animated in a different way to highlight their personality and attitude, whether that's through their stance, posture, or general speed of movement!

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Most of these animations, as seen from the feedback notes, focus heavily on animation basics with a special attention to overshooting, arcs, exaggeration, and anticipation (and general speeding!). While the rest are also important to pay attention to, to me these four elements are my go-to for making any animation or general movement look more impactful and lively.

In some cases, I had to slow down the animation frame rate to study how the body form and silhouette looks in each and every frame, especially when it comes to delay and weight as in some cases, it's the hips that lead the body, and in others the head, and in others the hand and so on!

Because being an animator means randomly staring at strangers in public studying how their limbs move and not noticing you are practically zoning out at them (please tell me that it's not just me who does this....)

 

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That’s our current stage in the process! It's chaotic, it's detailed, it's imaginative, yet it's somewhat enchanting to see static models transform into characters with genuine personality🌟