Liliana’s quest style test

 So I have been working on this personal project for a while called Liliana’s Quest, a adventure game with a visual style reminiscent of dragons lair and classic Disney movies. I have been chipping away at this project doing character designs and teaching myself how to animate and learn how to paint backgrounds in the style I want. I’m thinking I might create a specific dev blog for this project so I can share all my progress with stuff like character designs etc. but for now I wanted to share an update while it’s fresh in my head.

I recently just finished the biggest bit of animation I’ve ever done. I’m still pretty novice at animating and wanted to take a shot to a relatively finished product to see if I can even achieve the style I have in my head, this would be helpful as I want the game to have lots of high quality cutscenes. I made a lot of mistakes in the animation that I didn’t pick up on until I was too far in the process, I decided to power through and finish the shot just so I could see a final product but overall I’m not very happy with this piece from just an Animation perspective but I think in terms of trying to hit the exact style I want, it’s not too far off and I think that’s a success as it tells me I can get the look I want.

Anyway here’s the shot…

As you can see it was just a simple shot but it took me ages to finish and even longer because of the errors I made along the way. The biggest mistake is I had shot some video reference of myself for the shot and when I was plotting in the keys instead of doing them based on the important poses of action I stupidly just plotted them at 1 second intervals as I think at the time I thought that was a good idea to get the rough motion down. This was a big mistake as it meant when I put in the timing charts they were based of just 1 second intervals and not actually the natural ends of arcs of motions which gave the animation an overall robotic feeling. 

The other major mistake is I didn’t refine my keys enough before getting into the breakdown and inbetweens and it meant I had to do a lot of the animation thinking during clean up which is bad for the overall motion and also just takes way longer as now your also focusing on doing clean up. I think I can improve this by refine the motion way more in a tie down phase that isn’t nearly as tight as full clean up but nails down all the motion and action, ready for inbetweens.

Here’s some of the things I have learnt from the experience. 

1. Nail down the keys in the rough animation far more than I did

2. Thumbnail out the action before animating 

3. Don’t do all the breakdown and inbetweening on the loose animation as it locks you down too soon

4. Figure out the arcs and motion far more before committing to clean up 

5. Timing charts should correspond more with the flow of motion of important keys

6. The keys should describe the important poses of the action not just set at even intervals.

Here’s just the line art I think it’s clearer in here that the action is a bit robotic because of the errors I made.

Overall I have mixed feelings about this shot, I was working on it for so long i am really sick of looking at it and the errors I made early on. However this did answer a lot of questions and I learnt a lot about the process of animation that seems obvious now but I didn’t really know about until I had done it wrong. In a lot of ways this kind of exercise in art is one of the most valuable as you learn way more but i guess as an artist you still wish you could like the piece more. 

I am pretty happy with the background painting as it was just a quick 2 hour-ish painting and I think gets the vibe I want, in the final production I would spend a lot more time on a background like this and add a bit more visual interest but it was gratifying to get something I was happy with quickly as the animation took so long, of course most shots might not be as easy and I still need a lot of practice. It’s not anything I would want to show off isolated on its own in my portfolio but in the context of the shot it works. That being said here it is on its own without the filters..

One good sign in all this is how much I’ve learnt and I feel confident I could do a much better job next time. As I was doing this exercise I was watching James Baxter’s animation demos he has done for university courses online and seeing his process was really informative and helped show me how I should be approaching the animation more than what I was doing. I think this will help me a lot when I do my next shot. Next up however I’m gonna go back to training and work through more exercises as it’s clear I need more practice of the fundamentals.