Idle animations

Idle Animations

Since I enjoy animation but i don't feel that it's one of my strong suits I thought I would like to step back into it by making some gifs (of jifs if you prefer). 

I wanted to make it a looping animation and I enjoy making animations of characters I thought an idle animation would be a good start. 

I decided to take some notes from games and decided that a classic fighting game would give lots of examples for me to look at. I chose Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to take my examples from. I found that the most common format was a simple stance with breathing and a bit of back and forth motion along with a single action sequence. An example of this is Bayonetta's animation which starts at 11:47. She stands in an intimidating stance for a few seconds before making a beckoning motion with her gun. there are also some characters that have a sequence with 2 actions as well such as peach which is at 2:07 where she stands still,  then stretches, stands more, then looks around. I believe the shortest idle animation comes in at 3 seconds while the longest was about 35 seconds.

I didn't want to look at other Nintendo games to draw research from since I thought they might be too similar so I looked at some animations from Xenoblade Chronicles. These animations proved to be more complex and busy. Since this isn't a fighting game I think that they might be more busy because they aren't waiting for a fight. the actions are also less aggressive and show more personality to the individual characters which I help gets into the role-playing aspect of the game. these idle animations were often way longer, going a minute or two before repeating, which in this context makes sense since it isn't as action based.

Other fighting games like street fighter are similar to the super smash bros animation which makes sense but I felt it was necessary to look at some of those too since it is often seen as the origin for idle animations. 

I think making an idle animation with this knowledge will be easier since I now know that a lot of the time is spent by the character just standing there breathing and looking around and only a fraction of the animation is comprised of actual action.

Work log:

Monday: texturing

Tuesday: drone flight

Wednesday: texturing and staging

Thursday: staging

Friday: lighting and setting up smoke effects