This was not the best month for the project so far. As last month ended I was quitting caffeine and consistently having my ass kicked from the fatigue of doing so, and the tail end of that continued into this month. Before long, though, I was able to consistently open my eyes and think about things and sometimes, even, accomplish work. I completed the animations for standing up after a crouch, but then I started worrying about something I’d avoided thinking about for a while: Idle animations.
In most games the player’s character animates a bit even while otherwise not moving. Often this is as simple as a little bit of motion to suggest the character is alive: Slight movements, breathing, shifting weight, a breeze blowing by, and so forth. However, to touch lightly on the narrative of EverEnding, this character is not exactly alive in a human sense, so it feels correct that she would be perfectly still while not moving about for any particular purpose. Just leaving her on a static frame, though, made the animation feel inert and careless compared to the life of her animated movement – and, crucially, the liveliness of the procedural wind and water animations. At the same time, animating a constant breeze in the idle animation doesn’t feel right either, since any animation of reasonably brief length starts to quickly seem canned and unnatural in that context and, also, much of the time the character will be in an indoors environment where such a breeze animation doesn’t make much sense.
The solution I finally able to devise was to create two idle animations: One is the character standing stock still as I’d imagined, except with that frame redrawn several times to preserve the ‘living’ quality of the animation even when the character isn’t moving. The second animation is the same as the first, but with secondary elements like cloth and hair being blown in the wind. I can switch between these two animations based on environmental factors – perhaps even tying it somehow into the existing wind system that is controlling the behavior of the grass.
At this point I got derailed again by a minor family emergency, but once I got back on track I was confronted with a set of new problems: I had my crouching and my standing animations, but there’s also a lot of other crouching animations such as attacking and rolling and it only made sense, I thought, to get all of these in the same file to make transitioning between these and keeping them consistent easier. However, the more I thought about it the more I thought: Wouldn’t that be true for all of the character’s animations? So I embarked on creating one massive animation file to combine all of the character’s movements into. This was, I think, overall a good idea. I’m already finding it much easier to see what new animations need to be done, to see issues between animations and issues with proportions and reference points changing over time, but this also has lead to Problems. First and most obviously, it was just a big pain in the ass getting all of the existing animations laid out together and combined in a way that makes sense. However, that’s the challenge I signed up for – the challenge I didn’t sign up for was that this decision also, for whatever reason, lead me right into the buggiest part of Krita (the program I’ve been using for animation). Frame data which I’d copied over was being saved as a solid white block, and frames which I moved around would have garbage data around the edges I had to manually erase. These problems are still with me, but I’ve gotten better at bypassing them – and, more importantly, catching their effects before they ruin hours of work.
Even aside from the aforementioned difficulties, though, I’ve found the last week to be rough going. It’s unusually difficult for me to start focusing on animation work, and also to maintain that focus for longer than 30 minutes or so. As I get more used to my art setup here it becomes a little bit easier to dip in and out of work – a big advantage of having a pen display is that I can be mostly paying attention to something on my main display but look over and make little changes and improvements as they occur to me – but it’s still far more difficult for me to spend a lot of time and do a lot of solid work than it is when I’m working on programming, or even writing.
Nevertheless, I have made the master animation file, and while I’m still a ways off from creating all of the frames (some 450 or so in total) I have all of the basic motions planned out. There are actually a few character frames not covered here – I’m not sure if I’ll be adding the animations for getting damaged and defeated into this file or making another for them, since it’s harder to create a natural flow – but this is a pretty solid overview of what I need, and it is something of a relief to see them all laid out together, in a fashion that is perhaps a bit overwhelming but is eminently quantifiable.
