Neeva's running animation

Hey everyone!

This week I’ve been working on a new animation for Neeva .

Neeva is the fastest wrestler of the three girls -and to keep in shape, she'll be training on the treadmill Keen made for her. So that meant I had to make a running animation for her -and so I did :)

Now the first thing I needed to do was to find the right motion for this run-cycle. And so I’ve been sketching a while till I ended up with with this 10-frame animation-sketch.

Now ususally my next step would be to completly draw the first frame -and then use that art as a starting point for all other frames (which I then redraw a bit). But in this animation there are just so many overlapping parts (arms, legs etc.) that it would be no use to work like that.

So in this case I drew all bodyparts seperately. Then I copied entire set and posed the individual bodyparts again for the next frame, etc. And then you get this, a first clean version of the animation :

Next I applied several shading-effects to each individual bodypart, to quickly give the whole body some basic depth. In photoshop you can easily copy around such a set off effects, and this just took me a minute or two for the whole animation.



And then it suddenly looked like this. Pretty neat for a few effects right? :)


 


Well,  till this point, things went pretty quick. But from here it's all a bit more work to refine things. Below you can for example see how I had to draw several unique poses for Neeva's right hand, because it almost completly turrns around during the animation. (The final result can be seen in the animation above).




Well, and that’s where I ended today. The animation still needs some more work...and Neeva needs some clothes :) But I hope you already like the animation so far.

In my next post I will tell you about the mini-game I’ve been designing for Neeva's story. But... first I’ll take a short break to celebrate X-mas; which in my case means playing some classic point n click games by candle light :)

Well, I hope you enjoy X-mas as well,
have fun & and all the best!

-Robin