Animation for Video Games

3D Animation: Introduction Recently, I animated a wolf from the Paragon Shinbi pack using Unreal Engine 4. Using the tutorials, I realized that getting 3D animations to work properly in UE4 requires several instances of programming such as variables, states, Boolean rules, and more. I have also learned that two concepts discussed in Game Anim are affected differently between 2D and 3D animation styles. The Principles: Anticipation The first of these would be anticipation. In general, this is a simple indication to the player that an action is about to occur. For example, if a player presses the jump button, the character could bend his or her knees or even squat to anticipate the jump. In my 2D Link animation, I incorporated this as well as squash and stretch to show Link squatting to anticipate his jumps, slipping to anticipate his falls, and landings to anticipate him returning to his regular stance. While I am new to the world of 3D animation, I think that including an anticipation ...

     Blog 4: The 5 Fundamentals of Game Animation By Payton Grady After reading Chapter 4 of Game Anim, I have learned that there are five fundamentals of game animation: Feel, fluidity, readability, context, and elegance. While sketching animationsfor Link, I have carefully considered concepts such as fluidity, context, and elegance. Jonathan Cooper states the following about fluidity,  "Rather than long flowing animations, games are instead made of lots of shorter animations playing in sequence. As such, they are often stopping, starting, overlapping, and moving between them. It is a video game animator's charge to be involved in how these animations flow together so as to maintain the same fluidity put into the animations themselves" (Cooper 44). In other words, game animators have to make sure their work flows even when certain animations could be cancelled out for gameplay reasons. I implemented this factor into my Link sketches by ha...

  Blog 3: Linking Animation with Combat Physics By Payton Grady                          For my vector animation, I chose Link from the Legend of Zelda franchise. While the animation is not complete, I have made substantial progress and have still considered the 12 principles. Throughout the drawing process, I have implemented concepts such as exaggeration, animation, and secondary acti on.         The Legend of Zelda franchise in general has had several different graphic styles, but even the most realistic of them had cartoonish elements such as arms or weapons enlarging when attacking. For example, Ocarina of Time involved Link's weapons enlarging as he attacked enemies. Another Nintendo franchise, Super Mario Bros., used this aspect several times in games such as Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy. This concept is known as exaggeration, "looking to create the hyper-real, a bett...

       According to Jonathan Cooper, there are twelve different principles of animation. These include Squash & Stretch, Staging, Anticipation, Straight ahead & pose to pose, Follow-through and overlapping action, slow in & slow out, arcs, secondary action, appeal, timing, exaggeration, and solid drawing. Over the past weekend I replayed The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and several aspects stood out to me: squash and stretch, staging, anticipation, slow in & slow out, and secondary action.      To begin with, Squash and Stretch is “the technique of squashing or stretching elements of a character or object (such as a bouncing ball) to exaggerate movement in the related direction” (Cooper 28) After playing as the same character for years, I have noticed that there are specific points in which the Dragonborn’s body parts move. However, I would not say that the game employs this rule. Skyrim’s entire graphic style uses realis...