Day of the Piñata Week 6

Yet again another week on our Project of Day of the Piñata. We are moving steadily forward to an unknown future. This week I am working on the Piñata’s melee attack animation as well as their idle animations. What I will present to you is the Large piñata’s idle animation. Here it is in a poor quality gif!

The large Piñata differ from the small Piñata in color and design. It is because in our team we decided that we wanted that the largest piñata were going to have a bigger impact. It is bigger, it can destroy larger objects, it is more threatening! It’s appearance should communicate that as well. That is why the large piñata is a bull, because it is associated to be dangerous and trample things in it’s way. Bulls are typically associated with mexico as well as our game is taking place in. Moving on, the bull piñata was given sharp horns jutting forward making it dangerous for anyone in front of it. Overall it has more carper edges than the previous piñatas. And it has glowing eyes to illustrate that the evil spirit possessing the piñata is at it’s strongest.

Even when standing still I wanted the piñata to be threatening. A bull threatening to charge. Yet, I am limited to just be able to move certain parts of the piñata without bending them. It is the huge drawback of animating on a rig. So I did what I could.

Still working with animating with a rig in flash I made the middle folds of the piñata to move as if it was breathing. I added movement to the tail tassel and the trim to increase the “life” of the piñata since stretch and squash can’t be used in this. The head is moving up and down giving slight movement to the tassels on the sides of its head to increase the illusion of breathing. It made the piñata look rather alive and active, but it needed something more. In the group we have already early discussed the large piñata’s aesthetics, and making it have a flame-like inside illustrating the angry spirit within. So embers was added coming out of it’s nostrils when exhaling. It was made very simple in flash using motion tween. I made the ember glows follow a curvy line, growing and shrinking in size.

So there we have it. The idle animation of the Large Piñata.

Day of the Piñata Week 5

For this week I have started working on the animations for the Piñata. I decided to learn how to animate in flash with the bone tool to be able to produce animations faster as we will need three different animations for each action of the player character. How I thought the piñata would move proves to be perfect to this method as well. The Piñata is made of paper hence can’t stretch or morph much as it would break. The loss of animating with the bone tool is that you can either get no stretch or distorted stretches as you stretch the image itself. Therefor this technique is perfect when I don’t want to do any of that!

Starting with, when you are going to build a skeleton for 2D images you need to have every piece by itself. I want to be able to move the head of the Piñata without having a plank space being left behind it in its front part and neck. So I drew every piece as whole. Like this:

It is like a paper doll, which is appropriate since Piñatas are paper made!

Next I had to import my parts into flash. I had big troubles with this because my images either lost quality or became distorted. My solution to that was to have a PSD with all the parts in separate layers. Then I imported one layer at a time from that PSD as a movie clip. If I did not follow this process the layers got confused with each other and got dirty with pixels from other layers.

The next step was simply to link all the pieces together with the bone tool to create a piñata skeleton. When done it was only to get animating. The skeleton makes it able to drag and move the pieces related to each other at once. It can’t be controlled to 100% so I had to go in and rotate and move some parts individually in the essential frames. Still it is a much faster process than moving each part individually for each frame. You just make a new frame and move the skeleton and adjust the parts to your liking, and the program does the rest. It is like a motion tween but much more manipulation friendly. Here is an image of the skeleton and how it keeps all the parts in place when moving them around.

I would say that this method is very cheap, and it is difficult to get life into the animation since there is a loss of squash and stretch which is one of the twelve elements of animation. Yet, it is helpful and fast, and rather realistic to the material as of this case.

Here is a preview of the small piñata’s walkcycle. It needs polishing, but it is a start! See you next week!

Day of the Piñata Week 4

A new year, a ned course, a new project.

Game development is our new course and we are developing a game, from concept to finished product over a ten weeks time. We are in our fourth week in developing “the Day of the Piñata”. The concept for the game is to play a Piñata who got possessed by a vengeful spirit on the day of the dead in mexico. The Piñata want revenge for all of the poor piñatas who get masaccred just because of their sweet insides. So the mission of the players is to play the Piñata and wreck the festival and save a Piñata in the end of the level.

My job in this project is so far mostly on the player character, the Piñata. In the game the Piñata can gather candy, and depending on how much candy it has it have different sizes. There are three of those. Small, medium, and large. To get smaller the player can shoot candy as projectiles. I worked on all three this week, but I’m only going to talk about the small one for now.

We had many different ideas for the Piñata, and here are some of them.

Nr 1 and 2 was the first idéas when following the original concept idea of a rather cute Piñata. Round shapes and not much detail. Yet each size didn’t speak much of its abilities. Like, the bigger you get the bigger objects you can destroy. You get more dangerous, that should have a visual difference.  Also the idéa of the game was going to be a bit darker than the original concept. How we were going to animate the Piñata was the reason of the take of nr 3 and 4. Piñatas are made of paper, hence they would not be able to move their limbs much, or they would rip. Thats why we I cut the Piñata in half and added folds, like with a accordion or paper lantern. It would make the Piñata able to move in a realistic way related to its material.

My favorite of these was nr 3, yet it was too extreme and not the feeling I wanted for the small Piñata. The smallest one was going to be the most “friendly” and normal, and then the bigger it gets the more extreme it gets. So it was made into nr 4. Its accordion spine much smaller and shorter that also makes the Piñata look emptier, since this is the form of the Piñata with the least candy.

When the design was done I made the lineart in photoshop, pretty thick to make the Piñata easier to distinguish from the background. Then colored and shaded. The colors was hard to decide. We ended up with purple, pink and green as the contrast color. The idea is that the color will change slightly by each size, getting darker. Green was decided because of its positive association. Like stop light. Green means go. That’s why the next size will have a yellow contrast color, while the purple and pink will be darker. To keep the sense that it is the same Piñata getting bigger I decided to keep two of the colors, just darkening them for each size, but having a contrast color that changes. It leaves enough trace of the previous size within the colors.

So that is the small Piñata I did this week! There is two more and animations going to be made!

See you next week!