Movement Styles - My Week In GameDev - 11/25 to 12/1

Salutations reader! This week the topic of study in the course was the use of movement and paths in animation. Specifically "Straight Ahead" style and "Pose to Pose" style. In straight ahead style we simply draw the frames one at a time in order allowing the animation to grow organically. Pose to pose involves knowing exact poses you're going to want to include and drawing those first so that you can't stray from them.

This first example is essentially pure pose-to-pose, I knew where I wanted to start and end up, and how many bounces I wanted in between. So I drew each of the impact frames first and then simply filled in the motion required to connect each of those frames.

This next one is a bit of a mix though more straight ahead than not. I knew I wanted the red ball to bounce off the ground once and hit again before moving off frame, but otherwise I wasn't concerned with how it happened and so drew all but two frames ahead of time (on the table and first impact).

Here we were directed to build a set with only a few pieces and combine them to build a scene. One side effect is that there are a lot of repeating elements, however by re-using elements you are able to put scenes together very quickly.

This sunset image is from a challenge where by we were asked to create a sunset scene to practice animating color changes over time. I usually like to stray from the basic instructions at least a little bit so I added palm trees in the foreground that fade to black for a little extra fun.

This final animation was part of a lecture about easing in and out of animations. The animation at the top of this page is similar but uses a smooth drop. This version eases slowly into the drop and then speeds up. By easing in and out you create anticipation about what sort of movement is about to happen in the image.

We are now in December and quickly coming up on a full six months of doing game dev daily (started July 1st); I'm going to have to plan a nice post for the end of December~