This week we’re focusing on the animation in our app – inspiration, techniques and challenges.
Inspiration
We’re working towards completing a prototype of our app and have been concentrating on animation experiments with one of our characters, a toilet monster.
The idea is that each monster is made from objects you’d find in a house and associated with the room they’re in. We wanted to make sure the movement of the monsters’ was as fluid as possible to really get their character across so we tried out different animation software packages including Spriter, Puppet 2D, Smooth Moves and Spine. We finally settled with Spine – it allows us to make the monster’s movements fluid with plenty of dynamic control and integrates well withUnity 3D.
Animation techniques
One of the best things about Spine are the mesh warps – they allow us to distort polygon meshes of the characters’ elements making the animation feel more fluid while keeping the file size to a minimum. The skeletal animation and IK system allows the bones to move in a very natural way, the character can pose, bend and jump around with a lot of freedom.
Without the need to redraw sprite frames it makes the animation file size in the app a lot lighter.
Apart from the characters, we’re also animating other elements in each scene. In here we have water running in the sink (animated with Spine) and also liquids spill on the floor (a PNG sequence animated with After Effects).
Don’t miss our next post…’Developing with Unity 3D’