Post 5

This will hopefully be the last time I redo things in this death animation. I hate smoke but I hate animating smoke even more.

Shown here are the three death animations I’ve done so far for the player avatar and I’m still not entirely satisfied. I’ve described my workflow for each animation in previous posts, each describing me finally feeling done with the animation. Now here I am again.. think I might be a bit of a perfectionist?

First

second

Third

The first animation was made in the wrong format and when I redid it I added  perspective by tilting it downwards. I also made the plane spin downwards instead of just dropping like a stone. This was where my problems with smoke animation started. I felt that what ever I did, the smoke and fire looked glitchy and moved unaturally around the plane. To be fair, it looked really nice in the game since  the player plane spins even more than it does in the animation alone. The reason for that is, in an animation like this the plane has to be in the exact same position throughout the animation to later be moved by the  programmers as they see fit. If I hadn’t put the plane in the same spot throughout the animation, the gifs above would be as big as an A4 paper.

Redoing the smoke, I decided to first make a reference ring around the plane that the smoke would always follow throughout the animation. If you compare the second animation and the third you can see that in the third the smoke is moving in a tight circle compared to the  uncontrolled fire/smoke mix in the second animation.

The  exaggerated spin that the circle creates, works better in the game where the spin is pretty much 360 degrees, compared to  90 degrees it is in the gifs you see here.

Making these three animations have taught me a lot and making the smoke with these animations was a pretty easy and fast process. I made one smoke cloud and copied it. The further the plane moves the more copied smoke clouds are released. When the plane actually hits the ground and the explosion starts  there is a total of twelve small clouds put together. All while following the reference ring I started with, to make sure the smoke followed the path I wanted. A new layer above the I created a new layer on top of the  copied clouds  so I could draw on  them to make them appear connected  and hide the fact that the clouds are identical.  This was the finishing touch. I’m not sure if I like the second or the third one best though…

Thats all for this week and hopefully this !?=()/# death animation! 😀

(PS. I think I keep redoing it because I like it so much)