"The Journey into 3D game animation by someone who's never animated before"

                       "The Journey into 3D game animation by someone who's never animated before"

                   Since September 2022 I have been developing a game that will teach about the effects of environmental destruction and pollution.  This game is Titled “The Last Forest Guardian”.  It stars a chubby genius raccoon named Chip who attempts to save his woodland home from the effects of pollution and environmental destruction. With the help of his homemade makeshift robot suit. Chip must find the components of an old broken planter drone that when fixed will revitalize the whole environment back to its former glory.  Chip must use his robot suit, along with his natural strengths including his small size and speed to find all three drone pieces to revitalize the forest and save his home!   In this dev log, I will be discussing the journey of my newly acquired skill I have had to learn for the sake of the quality of the game “The Last Forest Guardian”.  The skill in question is animating the main character Chip who is a raccoon, a four-legged creature.   I will be talking about my journey and the process of trying to learn 3d animation in a few weeks.

  Firstly, let's start with the issue.   I was tasked to animate debatably the most important asset in our game. That being the titular character Chip.  I was also tasked with modelling him so it only felt right that I animate him as well, along with the fact that blender has a built-in animator as well so, it would be easy to start there.   I had no experience doing animation in any way shape, or form. There were many problems that I faced with animating the main character for our game both technological and theoretical in the field of animation.   I had no choice but to learn this skill quickly and persevere, or else our game will suffer as a result.  One of the issues I had when animating  Chip was rigging him. 

  My first roadblock came when I was animating the walking and running animation.  There were very few references to how a raccoon walks and runs in the animation outside of nature videos that show raccoons.  So, a good alternative I found was using animation frame drawings for dogs since they move similarly, and there were plenty of animation drawings and videos of dogs jumping, running, walking, and sitting.  I used these references throughout.  I also benefited by watching videos on people animating using keyframes in blender for all types of models, not just 4-legged creatures.  Keyframe animation “is something that defines the starting and/or ending point of any smooth transition. That something can be a drawing in animation or a particular frame of a shot when dealing with film or video. Any shot, animated or live-action, is broken down into individual frames. You can think of keyframes as the most important frames of a shot that set the parameters for the other frames and indicate the changes that will occur throughout as transitions” (Kench)

(Animation sheet for exporting Chip the Raccoon)

   The 2nd issue that came with doing this was making the limbs move in a way that felt natural.  There were many times during animation like this when Chip's legs would not move correctly which could range from not moving at all to moving in a way that looked very glitchy.  As a result, I spent a lot of time editing each limb in every keyframe to ensure each animation felt as natural as possible and as a result it came out very well.  

My second and most annoying roadblock came when I had to rig and export Chip.   Blender has two ways of rigging: you can either use a pre-built rig or use individual armatures to rig the model to your liking.  At first, due to a lack of time, I decided to use the pre-built rig.  Even despite the mesh breaking and stretching, if I pulled the limbs too far or rotated I still pressed on and I got the animation working with a pre-built rig.  But, when it came time to import them into unity that's when trouble hit.  I found out that unity does not like animations that were made with pre-built rigs.  The only way that they would work was with add-ons from blender and other extensions that would take days to figure out.   I then made the call to redo my animations with the armature.  I had two days to do animations which took me a week and it was not easy.  I ended up finishing them all in two days. Many of them looked better to not having the same mesh issues.  

However, Two animations suffered with the two-day time limit for the walking and jumping animation.   The walking animation, while it moves, is much more subtle than the older the same as the jumping.  My one regret is that this whole process is not sticking with my initial instinct and going with the armature method I thought using a pre-built rig would be faster and more efficient turns out it was not.  As a result my animations, while functional and good for a beginner, suffered.  Overall, I feel like I did a decent job with my animations despite there being many ways I could’ve done better and things I would change about the experience to produce better quality animations.  The bright side is that I can take these experiences and use them if I ever find myself in the situation of having to make animations again. 

Kench, Sam. “Keyframes in Animation — Origins and Modern Uses.” StudioBinder, 2 October 2022, https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-are-keyframes-in-animation/. Accessed 15 March 2023.