Sprint 2

To start this sprint off I was in a really good spot based on what I had completed. I had 2 full rigs which means I was able to jump into the first couple sets of animations immediately and get a lot done.

I started off with the pogo leg because it had the most animations that needed to be made and the most complicated rig out of the ones I've made so far. This was by far the most complicated and time consuming process of this sprint because on top of the normal time to animate and make edits based on my producer and designers input I was also learning to animate and be efficient in a new program. 

Thankfully based on my knowledge of maya and animation in general it was pretty quick to pick up the animation in this software though it did take a little trial and error. The main struggle I'm still having with this program is that it doesn't have an adjustable time slider so if I have all my animations on one file I cant view each of them one at a time I have to watch them all play all the way through. This is not a serious problem but I can be a little annoying and take a little bit longer than average.

I think this rig worked out really well for the amount of previous experience I had before making it. If I were to make it again I would have not worried about making the rig so technical and complicated and focus on making it just functional for me because I am the only person animating with it so it. It doesn't need to have all the extra quality of life parts that I would have if I was making this rig for someone else.

For this model I needed to create a "deploy" animation to show the leg coming on screen, a "ready" animation for when the player holds right click to show that the leg is ready to bounce, and idle animation in the ready and unready state, a bounce animation, and an "undeployed" to get the leg off screen when the player is on the ground.

Overall I really liked how these turned out and after I had these ones done it was a lot easier to understand the vision my designer had for all the animations in the game.

Moving on to The shotgun leg the first thing I had to do was draw and rig a quick "firing" addition for the rig I had already made. this was nice and simple and I really liked how cartoonish it turned out. I think there could have been a better way to make this if I had done it at the same time as the rest of the process but this rig works perfectly fine for what i need it to accomplish here.

The animations for this leg were much easier than the pogo leg. Since this leg only needs to go onto the screen and shoot it got broken down into four simple animations. These ended up going much faster too once I had the hang of the whole process. It worked out perfectly so that I finished these towards the end of this sprint so I can start up with a new rig and animations on the next one.

The animations for this leg were the deploy and undeployed similar to the pogo leg and then an idle animation and a shoot.

I love how these turned out and I'm very excited to tee them implemented into the game.

Exporting and formatting these animations was quite a challenge for me. It took a ton of trial and error and was very frustrating. I had to export the mp4s along with the image sequences so that I could make sprite sheets for unity. The exporter in this program is very unintuitive but I powered through. Now that I've completed it I think I've figured out a process that works but I will be prepared for the amount of time it will take in the future. 

Sprint 1

For this sprint I started out with the concept sketches for both the pogo leg and the shotgun leg. Luckily I was able to work on this during class so I could quickly check in with my designer after each iteration and change until I ended up with the sketches above and below. I had a little bit of a hard time picturing the idea my designer had in mind for both of these legs but I made sure to check in regularly do I didn't get too far into the rendering process without the right look we wanted and it worked out well for me.

After I had both sketches done I moved onto the final rendered versions of each leg which you can see on the left side of both images above. With all of the preplanning and revisions that went into the sketches for these I was pretty confident in my ability to make the renderings look just right. The only difficult part about this process was keeping in mind that these drawings were going to have to be rigged in the future so I had to think a lot about which layers needed to be separate in order to move properly and where I should extend each layer to to account for movement of other layers. In the end I only went back to fix one thing once I got into rigging and realized what needed to be changed so I count that as a success.  

Once all the drawings were done I moved on to rigging them to get ready for animation. In order to make these 2d rigs I used a program called Moho which I have never used before. It had a bit of a learning curve to try to learn to rig a 2d model especially with the specific movements I need for this project. I think I did pretty good for my first attempt at this program and one of my first attempts at rigging in general. Luckily I am the only person who is going to be animating with either of these rigs so I can compensate for my lack of rigging knowledge with my animation skills.  

I think overall this is a slower start to a sprint than I would normally like. During this sprint I also took or found a bunch of reference video for my animations. I only had cards for 7 days of this sprint and the rigging took me a little longer than I would have liked but I think I have created a good base that so I can hit the ground running for the next sprint.