The Magic of Animation

Today, I want to write about the 2D hand animations I have been making for Bewitching Baking. I will reveal how I make them.

We decided to run the animations at 11 frames per second. It saves me time and keeps the size of the game more manageable. I have finished four of these animations thus far. The shortest one is 18 frames, while the longest one consists of 42. All in all, I have painted 114 frames to date. Most animations are of a single hand moving, but in some, I have had to animate both hands.

My painting style is pretty realistic. To make my process at least a bit quicker, I rotoscope the base movement off a video we filmed. I import the video to Adobe After Effects where I lower the frame rate to 11 and then export the images. Initially, we decided on the 11 frames after testing the frame rate on a video.

First, I do a quick line art trace of each image. Then I use the photos as a reference and start painting. I often copy the last set of hands while painting and first try to cut and warp it to fit the next hands' shape. This procedure ensures I keep the coloration approximately the same for each frame.

A few rotoscoped frames.


All the hands for a clapping animation.


After I have painted all the hands, I import the layers back to After Effects where I assembly the animation. The first time I was doing this, I was pretty nervous: what if it doesn't look any good? I was so relieved it worked. I then export the layers in png for Anniina to move into Unity.


Unlike the hands, I mostly animate Wynona's head in After Effects. I will write a post about that process later.

Kristiina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conjuring Feelings Through Music

Image
As a small team of two, Kristiina and I have needed to develop different skills for our projects. For example, Kristiina has learned animation skills ( she has written about animation in this blog post ); I, in turn, have dipped my toes into creating music. Composing is both entertaining and challenging. You need to capture a specific kind of feeling, an atmosphere, as a combination of sounds. Sometimes, figuring the desirable sensation is tricky in itself. First of all, a song needs to suit the project. While we have been working on Bewitching Baking, Kristiina and I have discussed how both of us envision the atmosphere of the game. During our conversations, Kristiina suggested that we could aim for something calm, warm, and happy, with a little bit of soothing melancholy included. This suggestion brings us to the second challenge: subtle nuances and contradictory vibes. Happiness and melancholy may sound like a strange combination, even like an impossible mixture. Joe Hisaishi's
Read more

Welcome to the Bewitching World of Baking!

Image
Hello, everyone and welcome to our blog where we write about the development of our games. We are a small indie team of two siblings from Finland, and we have been making games together since 2017 when we registered our company Innokas media . We have published games on mobile, both iOS and Android, and in the future, we wish to make games on desktop as well. This blog's purpose is to log and share our experiences as a small indie team and communicate with and inform our potential players of our games. Currently, we will mainly focus on the development of Bewitching Baking: a casual mobile game about a witch that likes to conjure up desserts. The game is a relaxing experience of completing different actions such as touching and sliding buttons and tilting the mobile device. Once the level is over, the game gives the player a score and tells them what dessert they have created. After this, the player can find the dessert in the recipe book found in the game. If the player has sc
Read more