DevLog: Animation Edition

Yo,

Hey all. So I've been working on something  that we'll hopefully see in this next update and I kinda wanted to shine some light on it ahead of time as well as give some hints at future things that we'll be seeing in the revamp later.

So attached is a very quick animation (It's only 5 seconds) and unlike most teasers and stuff, I wanted to give this one a little context. So in v0.04, Zack will be giving Braden the orange singlet that he finds in the shower room. I've talked at length about Braden's character being more expressive in his facial features and I actually thought that this gifting moment could be an opportunity to practice some of this on a lower level. 

Obviously, in the original game, the first time we ever seen movement on the screen is for the kiss (which I've always called spinnykiss). I plan to keep spinnykiss in the revamp but that entire animation is going to be rerendered in new light and will be much more detailed than the original (hopefully). However, I didn't want to really hold off on practicing that until I got to that park scene because it's such an important part of the story and I want it to look amazing. So I decided to do something more simple and lowkey and introduce this facial expression change as a test of ability and see how it went. I originally wanted to do this for Zack's showerjack scene at the end of Chapter 1 but it didn't work out (I'm not ruling that out in the longrun, though, so I may come back to it). 

So today I'm rocking 30fps on this video animation. It's 5 seconds long and contains 151 images that were rendered originally in 4k and then converted down to 1080p so it will appear full screen in the game. It's depicting Braden slowly opening his eyes, his eyes slightly look up and focus and then his face grows slightly more serious, ending with his mouth a little open. Simple shit but facial stuff is kinda intimidating but it seems like a good place to start with this. So let me know what you think. Sometimes 3D animation comes off creepy so I want this to be simple but not creep people out. However, if you like it, it's a first opportunity to actually see Braden's character come to life and move just a little bit.