Another week of animation! Since last week I have had so much fun with the new death animation for the player plane. This week I got to do the death animation for the blimp, or the “Led Zeppelin” as it’s called. Erik Levin in our group made the Led Zeppelin’s moving animation and art in the game. It was up to me to make his nice blimp blow up. Fine by me mohahahaha.
Erik’s blimp, now this is gonna be fun to blow up!
So how does a blimp explode? It doesn’t crash like a plane does, the only blimp crash I know of is the Hindenburg and I wanted to avoid connection to that as much as possible. Our game has a comic tone to it anyway which would not go well with the Hindenburg reference. Instead, I chose to have a more comedic crash than a realistic one. Also, this blimp is not filled with anything flammable…
So how does a blimp crash comically? I decided to think of the blimp not as a blimp but more like a giant balloon. So what happens to a balloon if it would be pierced by a small potato (we shoot potatoes in the game)? My first thought was to make it fly away and deflate, like a balloon you let go of after you inflate it. However, such an animation would take me quite a long time and time is kind of scarce so I chose the other posibility. The balloon would just pop with a bang! The blimp also has a cabin on it’s belly so I decided to simply let that cabin drop straight downwards. Since the blimp moves so slowly, it would make little sense if the cabin would fly off in any other direction. Besides, it looks even more comical when it drops like a stone.
Since time was not on my side doing this and it’s the third animation I’ve done this week, I decided to play with photoshop and avoid as much new art as possible. I took the old sprite (image) and simply cut it up in a lot of, what is called in photoshop, layers. Once I had all those in layers I could simply move them a little away from the explosion and make them more transparant the further along the animation goes. I also added the little explosion which is made with two circles. First frame, the two circles are fairly small with a touch of motion blur to them. Second frame, I’ve enlarged the circles and added even more motionblur. The cabin was simple, I just made it smaller in every frame while at the same time making sure it’s positioned at the same exact spot.
Thats all for this week folks!
gustavlarssonblog 
Hello! First of, I love the name of the blimp. Secondly, I think you have really managed with the animation. It looks very good and isn’t to serious which goes well with the theme of the game. It’s also not to long which can help/be good if there is several blimps that you need to shoot down. Another thing I like about the animation is that you went with exploding animation instead of a deflating balloon. Since the game has a comedic feel over it I believe that making things explode, especially things that aren’t suppose to explode, explode is always funny and gives it a more unrealistic comedic feel(you may have to read that sentence twice).
It’s good that you explain how the animation is done and what software was used since there is alot of ways but it’s nice to know how the animation is done. I like that you explain how simple a animation can be and still be as effective as this one is, well done! Though I believe that you should have explained your work flow a bit more since it feels a bit short but still important. The blog talks more about why it looks the way it does instead of focusing on how it’s made, but that said I think that the process of the design choice is very interesting and i wouldn’t cut that of the blog.
GillaGilla