Case 2 – It’s alive!

Nerd Idle by ~SveinE89 on deviantART


Nerd run by ~SveinE89 on deviantART


Nerd jump by ~SveinE89 on deviantART

Like I posted earlier, this was the week that we we’re going to start animating our characters. In our group meeting we discussed what problems and challenges we could face and how we were going to handle them. For me the biggest challenges in this case were to figure out which tweens to use on your character, and how to make the loops look smooth. I watched a lot of tutorials, and read in

I decided to try using the bone tool, which is a tool that makes a “skeleton” for your character, by binding symbols together in the “joints” of your choosing. When you use the bone tool, all your symbols (in my character, all the body parts) are confined into one layer called the Armature layer. And then you can easily move your character’s limbs the way you want it on the timeline, and the tweens/animations between the key frames are automatically generated. Using a science called inverse kinematics the bone tool creates a realistic way of moving the limbs, by connecting them together. I also spent some time modifying each “bone” by constraining the maximum and minimum angle.

I first created the idle animation. I decided to make my animations kind of dorky looking, trying to make my hero look like a nerdy, asthmatic and kind of silly. So in the idle animation I made him breathe really heavily. I also animated his face, with eye-blinking and his mouth moving to make him look more alive. This animation was made in the face-symbol, and since I use the same symbol in all the different animations his eyes and mouth moves in all of them.

When I started animating the running sequence I faced some trouble using the bone tool. Halfway through the animation when I was going to move the legs and arms back to their original position, the skeleton and animation didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. Therefore I decided to use the Classic Tween. When using the classic tween, you make key frames on the timeline, change position etc of each symbol, then create the tween between the key frames. This is maybe a slower way than using the bone tool, but I felt that I had more control.

In the end I placed the complete symbols in a sprite. In class, and by looking at the tutorial we got, I learned that a sprite is a flashfile containing several animations/symbols of a character, for instance running, jumping etc. Each symbol is placed on an individual frame in the timeline. Sprites are used when scripting.