Animation
This week I started the animation and since we are going to be using the animation layers I have done some research to understand better how do they work. I have found this video which O have found very explicative:
Following what I had just learned on the video I have started the idle animation for seagull B, assigning to each part that needed animation an animation layer:
I also imported the sound of the game inspired from spongebob theme song to sync the idle of the character to the music. On each animation layer I assigned a different key colour to differentiate them and also attached each control (wings, neck, body) to the correct layer.
I then started animating the seagull according to the inspiration I used as a reference which is the “Finding nemo” seagulls from the film (As I showed in the previous weeks). This is the final video:
Speech Bubbles
This week I also created the speech bubbles for the dialogues for the game according to the design made by Esme: for the black outlines I have used a cylinder extruded the top and bottom faces and edited the vertices to create a wavy frame for the speed bubbles; For the white background I have flattened a smoothed cube polygon and finally created a 3d text (ink free) which resembles the texts used in comics. I after animated the different components so that they would float around at different rates.
Player wing update
I also rearranged the player wing model according to the outliner hierarchy which works in the fox export for unity: the geometry, the controls and the joint should be individual parts of the same group.
Eye blink solution
The previous process I had created for the eye to blink (set driven key) was working fine when the character was in the position I had set the keys into, however when the body of the neck control position changed the eye blink would not work as well. Instead I thought of another way still employing the set driver key tool Which I have used and came up with in another project (the cat project): this time I have created another set of eyelids but closed, I have created two sets of attributes in the eyes controls, one for the open lids and one for the closed ones; I have saved the visibility of the eyelids instead of they rotation, so that when both the attributed are on to 1 the closed eyes would show and when the attributed are set on 0 the open eyelids would show.
Animations
This week I also started animating the interactions occurring in the game where the two seagulls talk to each other and to the player too: I have followed the animation layer video as before to assign to each control of each seagull an animation layer to work on and to keep everything organised. I have imported in one scene, which in this case is the Beach interaction 3 (according to the animation shot list), all the assets: the speech bubbles and the two seagulls an started animating the seagulls according to what they are saying in the scene also using the script as a reference especially since movements are included.
These are all the animation layers I have been working on
these are the animation which I will further clean up: