Fall Week 7 Worklog
So initially during this work period I was attempting to do some coding to get this player and camera movement system DONE, but I've realized it's a bit hard for me to focus when working in-class and also missing my second screen makes working in unity and coding stuff a bit of a pain. Not impossible of course, I've done it before but it definitely slows down my workflow compared to when I'm at home and can focus better. So because I wanted to be productive this class period I decided to start getting a jump on Doc's player animations, as while it's still far off my internal due date for that is sometime next month.
I knew I wanted them at a 3/4ths angle instead of having a front, back, and side sprite. I mean, they'll still have a front and back sprite technically but no left/right so that frees me from needing to animate the walk, jump, land, and whatever else for those. Making things easier animation-wise isn't the only reason I've opted for this of course, honestly the biggest reason why I'm doing this specific style is because I'm drawing inspiration from how the characters are displayed in the paper mario games and bugfables, the 2D characters in a 3D world (would they be 2.5D then…?). Stylistically I've always thought it was neat and so I want to try and replicate that myself in my own silly little project.
So here's our first problem: I don't really have a clear ref of Doc's new design at a 3/4ths angle. I had an idea in my brain as to what it looked like but nothing on paper yet, most of my struggle was positioning the eyes on their mask.
At first I tried to pull from the turnarounds I had done of their new design, which got the body's position and proportioning down but the eyes just seemed off to me. Not that this go was inherently "wrong" but I felt like the eyes could be positioned or stylized better. So I cracked open my sketch book (something I need to be doing way more) and tried to just draw their head from this angle over and over, and eventually I landed on one I liked.
Although because I am not the most steady artist, they were a bit slanted. Easy fix though, I just popped em into clip and edited the body so everything is posed where it should be and then made another sketch over that to make some more tweaks. This whole thing took a little over an hour but eventually I landed on a "sketch" I liked (it's a bit too clean to be a sketch honestly lol).
Then to animate the idle I just nudged some of the parts I thought would have some wiggle if the character had a slight bounce in their idle (so the ears, cape/clothes, hair) and I think I like this lower frame rate style. Again, drawing inspiration from paper mario 64 specifically.
...I realize the front is missing a finger but I'll fix that when I do the final version. Overall with this specifically I probably spent like, 3ish hours? I mostly worked during the latter half of class after trying to code wasn't working for me in the moment. Next, I plan on getting the motions down and hopefully roughing out the animations for the walkcycle and jump. I don't think it'll take me very long, maybe 3ish hours total if I run into trouble with figuring out Doc's motions, but that'll be for next session.
10/11/2024 - 10/12/2024
More animation yippee!! today I'm working on the walkcycle and jump if I can get to it. But first I realized I didn't make a back idle animation so I threw that together in like 20ish minutes
Anyways, I started by gathering some image references of animated walkcycles, as well as some sprite sheets from paper mario 64 and bugfables as I wanted to see how the walkcycles in those games were handled. I also pulled up an old walk spritesheet I had on hand from an older project that had a character with similar leg and body structure to Doc.
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| Bailey's sprite sheet I made back in 2022! |
In my first go I decided to pretty much ignore my refs and try to see if I could get a decent looking "down" motion as Doc does technically have a bend in their legs, but this didn't really work out. Also I definitely over-animated for a 4 frame cycle.
So on my (unfinished) second and third goes I more closely followed my refs and previous work. I realized that my contact should be where Doc goes down the lowest, not the pass. Its... been a minute since I've animated a walkcycle. Eventually I found something I liked so I'm calling this done for now. Both the front and back have some jank I gotta work out but I'll save that for when I'm doing cleanup.
Onto Jumping! this should be a lot easier since there's only really 3 key poses I need to do (wind up/land, jump up, and falling). I think in the future I might add some more motion but for now here's the roughs that took maybe about a little over an hour or so I wanna say. Again they're super rough but I anticipate they'll look a lot better when they're moving around in engine.
10/14/2024 - Back to Coding
womp womp. I gotta get this done though. I actually spent some time yesterday on this as well, mostly researching, to no avail. I was getting closer though... and today I won. I finally beat the camera problems. and in the most stupid way because it was just ONE (1) line of code I had to add and then do a bit of cleanup in the camera manager but the cinemachine is FINALLY angling properly around the player character.
That took a stupidly long amount of time to figure out but all we need now is the scroll wheel zoom... which I actually anticipate not taking as much time! I have an idea as to how I'm handling it. I have the body controller set to 3rd person follow, so all I really need to do is figure out how to adjust the camera distance through code and tie that to my scroll wheel inputs.
And after some research I got the camera distance tied to my scroll wheel inputs. For the time being I just have the inputs tied to the min/max zoom in/out but when I work on this next I'll be smoothing that out and making my final adjustments to the camera for now. Overall I wanna say that I was researching/playing around with the camera stuff for 3-4 hours total today? It's hard to say. What I DO know is that with this I am back on schedule which is relieving to say the least.
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