Another week has passed, and it feels like the time is flying by. Our group have been working dedicatedly for the presentation tomorrow. It feels like it was just yesterday that we sat down and looked through the design documents for Bloody Badgers, realizing that we had a lot of tweaking to do. This week I’m focusing on animating the smaller critters that are to roam the corridors of the basement. The critters don’t hurt the player, but will slow the players’ movement speed.
The critter concepts have been many. The group quickly decided on making them insect or spider-esque, as insects and arachnids (spiders) are animals that are creepy or scary to most people. This is also a way to define the critters as smaller and less dangerous, not capable of inflicting damage, compared to the bigger monster with more humanoid features. I’m rather fond of insects and arachnids, and have long wanted to create an eight-legged walk cycle. The spiders’ walk cycle did, as expected, prove to be more difficult to grasp than the ordinary walk.
I watched and studied many images and videos of spiders in order to see how their legs moved. My first try at animating it wasn’t quite as successful as it could have been. The legs looked flat and upside-down, and changed in size in an odd way. Consulting Richard Williams “The Animators Survival Kit”, a book and a series of cd-lectures that I warmly recommend to any animator, old as new, I found some great tips and tricks to use.
For the second try I coloured the pairs of legs in different colours so that it would be easier to distinguish them from each other. Instead of moving each pair separately, the spider now move the first and third pair of legs in unison, whilst the second and fourth pair moved together, countering the first pair. This went a lot better, and the legs felt like they moved more realistically even though there were still things to fix and change.
The legs were changes and moved slightly to make the movement more believable. Looking at the test animation the group then decided on making the body a bit slimmer, as the roundness of the first test made the spider look softer and kinder than we wanted it to. The legs were made slimmer and pointier to further enhance the creepiness of the critter. Shadows were added beneath the spider to clarify which legs were touching the ground, and which were lifted.
The spider still felt a tad stiff, but that was quickly fixed by making the body move together with the legs.
I wish all of the groups’ good luck with their Alphas, and I look forward to seeing the presentations of the games!
Have a great weekend!
MPh out.
Liten Skåning 
Hi Jonna,
Thank you for this blog post. It was very insightful for me to see somebody else’s work process within animation.
I can imagine that it had to be tough animating an eight legged creature instead of a two legged humanoid. Trying to figure out and studying how an arachnid actually moves its legs in relationship to each other is not the typical everyday thing to do, so my compliments to you for the hard work.
I don’t think I have any constructive criticism to give you on this post. I feel like you explained everything in a way that was easy for me to understand. That you showed several different stages of your work was very useful for me as a reader. If anything, I would have liked to know how long it took for you to reach the final product. This is mostly out of my own curiosity though, as I’m not sure how important it really is to document the time spent. Even more so for our class at this moment since our level of experience vary greatly.
So, to summarize it all. I feel like you’ve done a good job explaining the what, how and why in this post and I’m looking forward to seeing your finished game!
Keep it up!
Ida L
I can clearly see what you have been working on this week and I really appreciate that you show several steps of the process. Thanks to that it is very easy to follow and would probably be very helpful to anyone who is wondering how you go about animating things. It is interesting to see how much the animation is improved from the first one to the last. Showing these steps makes the blog post a lot more interesting and I realize I should probably try to do the same as it makes the post a lot more valuable and interesting for the reader.
You also explain what you have done and why you did it very clearly and I think it was a really good choice to move the body of the spider a little as it looked much more alive that way. I think the use of shadows was a clever thing; it really does make a difference when it comes to the legs, it is a lot easier to see that they are moving upwards.
To sum it up I do feel that your blog post fills all the criteria for the blog assignment; it is very clear and easy to understand. I like that you are straight to the point without getting lost in poetic writing and it is inspiring that you use so many pictures. The finished animation looks really good and I cannot really think of anything that would make your blog post more valuable, good job!