Tribute to the Platformer.

For some reason I tackled this one after doing the Cubey exercise. Bizarre and illogical i know, but thats what happened. This being a simpler exercise, I found i could judge the number of frames needed a little easier than before. I still couldn't draw a perfect circle for every frame unfortunately.



Here is last week's 2D cubey animation. The principle was to animation Cubey in the same way you do the bouncing ball, and then animate his antennae according to the way Cubey bounces. This is called primary and secondary animation. I was extremely pleased with how this turned out, especially after the mildly discouraging circle morph. Cubey has a real spring to him (mostly thanks to the squash and stretch) and his antennae waggles believably.



This week it was time to attempt the Cubey jumping, secondary animation exercise again; but this time using Maya. Time to move back into the realm of 3 dimensions.
This becomes very complex when you have to keep track of each and every value and attribute in the graph editor so as to smooth out the right bezier handles to correct specific movements and timings. Also when i rendered it out i had the image files name themselves name.extension.number, this was a very bad idea as when the extension (e.g IFF or PSD) os not at the end, no progam will recognise the file. It was great fun to bring some personality to the model we were provided with. I also added a couple of pillars for Cubey to jump to and from, a nostalgic homage to the days of Crash Bandicoot...