AGI Workshop Day9- Animation; Let’s go!

By Summah Briggs

RATIONALE –

Making today's idle animation was an important step in my production. When I began planning, I honestly thought I would only have this one animation completed by the end of the 2 weeks, but now I have much more time to make others.

CONTEXT –

An idle animation is important. Games without them, have their characters looking quite stiff, especially if there's background elements moving while the character isn't. Having a constantly moving character helps create that illusion of life.
Other such platformer games with distinct character idles, that are some of my favourites, would be Dust an Elysian Tail, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Indivisible. Though, all of these game's characters (except Ori) are frame by frame 2D animated.

METHODS –

When creating the idle animation, I actually made an attempt at first with the character bobbing on the spot, up and down, rather than what I did with them swaying. A lot of more upbeat platformer games have characters moving up and down for their idles, and it just doesn't suit the atmosphere I want. I thought maybe slowing the movement down would be enough, but it just made the character look drunk.
Scrapping that animation I started again, this time making the character have a slight swayed pose, very subtle. It works a lot nicer like this, and certainly suits the mood I want a lot nicer.
Spine's animating software is a little hard for me to grasp, there's no button to make a new keyframe; you just simple move the bone. This isn't a big deal, I'm just personally used to having full control of where a keyframe is before I animate.

OUTCOMES –

So now that I've created this one asset, I can move onto creating more and expanding my skills within Spine.
Tomorrow I'll be making a walking animation, which is certainly a lot more complicated that an idle animation. You need to remember weight in each joint and keeping in mind secondary motion is very important.
Hopefully though, I'll be able to create it along with the jumping and crouching animation, so I'll have more to present at the end of this folio!

Downloads: