Making of: Game Characters
29/01/2021
Two characters adventure on the 4th exercise of Migael-project: Roosa Ruuti who is in charge of of charging and blasting, and Topi Teräsvilla who takes care of the pre- and post-blast work and is responsible of the safety of the mining area. The characters guide the player to do the safety measures before and after the blasting. Although the game is made in 3D, the characters are 2D.
In this blog you get to know a little bit about how the characters were both drawn and animated. In the video above you can see the intro of the exercise. Before the animation, the creation of the characters began with designing!
The first draft and the final results!
First the characters were sketched and their visual style and personality were drafted. There were many options and above you can see the first drafts and the final versions of the final duo that ended up in the exercise.
Making of the Animations
The characters were drawn with variants of facial expressions and body positions so that the animating would be easy later on the process. All the moving parts of the character were made separately so that they could be animated by moving one part at a time. That way the rest of the drawing won’t become distorted when moving hands, for example.
On the video below, you can see the steps of animating Roosa Ruuti. The mouth, the eyes, the brows and the hands all had their own “bones” that were moved to the desired positions. When the positions transitions smoothly to one another it turns into animation.
Intro made frame by frame
The intro animations were made more traditionally in a similar way as stop-motion animations are made. The characters were moved little by little and every movement was made into its own frame. The frames create an illusion of movement when they are played one after another. Below you can see couple examples from the first scene of the intro.
Animating is faster when all the finger are made separately.
This is how the characters from the 4th MiGaEL-exercise were born! You can find more info about the project at migael.fi. The 4th game exercise is in the making and it will be published soon!