Personal: TV Paint Practice - Leonne's Hair

I started this as a practice drawing in TV Paint a few months ago as a learning curve when I had more spare time before starting to work on Crew Projects. I had no real plan but I wanted to draw a character of mine who I had always visioned as with cloud-like and explosive hair, which I could never draw out in stills showing exactly what I meant. He was inspired from Nia Teplin from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in this way.

Inspirational shot: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

I animated him (without hair) in roughly a day as a test to understand TV paint as a medium before working on films. I came back to him months later (today) when I found more time and decided it was time to tackle the hair which was why I wanted to do this.
I hope to clean this up one day too as it would be a nice practice piece.

I animated his hair on 2s, I wasn't aware of how the properly animate by frame count when I fist started him(body) however. There were no key frames in this piece.

I had initially thought of using it as a lip sync practice but there was no voice clip I had planned and decided to scrap that and focus on the hair.

BTEC: Stop Motion 1

I designed a short story "Cats End" which would be animated with paper figurines in stop motion of characters that I made who were humanized cats, running through an obstacle field. I put a lot of work into the pre production side of this.

Character design work and colour scheme decisions for the main character

An animation test for what I would need to make

After designing and working on characters I worked on a rough story board

TBS: Animations final

For the last leg of the course we were in crunch hour and it seemed we were all finally pulling our collective weight. I think if we had worked at least half as hard as we did in the last week we could have achieved so much more. In the end I wasn't able to complete my animations for the game and had to leave a few out as even though they were close to finished and placeholders were ready we couldn't program them into the game. As sad as that was I'm glad it's finished and I can reflect on it now realizing the large scale of work I did do and how I can now work at a much faster pace. Team members finally helped me with the animations at the end, helping with the simplest colouring of the animations late into the night before, it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things but it was a huge help. Many of the following animations were unable to be put into the game even as a placeholder due to no programming able to be found for the requirements to make the animations happen in game.

This animation could have been in game but the programming to do it would take too long and we would have missed the deadline.

We did not know how to program a death sequence into the game.

The following were finished by other members of the team while I finished the above. Many of these were also unable to be programmed into the game, endign up with only the L/R movements, Statics, and the Hits of the Shadowwalker (the tall one). I finished a static one as an example. 

The attack animation for the Shadelings was revised many times as I could not animate how I wanted it to look due to skill sets and what I was able to do the team mates were unhappy with, this was the final one I managed to do which met halfway what I wanted but could not do and was greatly appreciated by the group.

Death animation we couldn't program in. 

Hit animation that was done quickly and then was not able to be implemented into the game.

L/R animation was used for U/D movement too. 

An up/down aniamtion that was not able to be put in due to time. 

Split animation was another attack for them. Also unused.

TBS: animation sprite sheets

I redesigned the designs for characters into the style used from the Style Guide to fit with the grid. I simplified and focused on form and shape so they'd be visible in animation. I had calculated the animations I needed to make by this point for an assignment and since the game had had cuts i managed to cut down the amount of content I needed to make for the sprint and managed the amount of time I had to make it. I knew for the tutorial level I would need the Shadelings, Shadow Walkers, Herdsmen, and Beserkers. The Herds men were redesigned later in the process by an artist and the rest of the Gruk had yet to be designed. I started out by making basic animations for the up and down movement on the grid for the Herdsmen design and the left and right movement for the Shadeling. I finished up, down, left, and right for the Herdsmen only making the keyframes to work with Agile, and drew out basic tweens for the Shadelings only because they moved in a unique inhumane way that I would have no reference for and wanted to understand their movement fully before moving onto the next part. Sadly the Herdsmen were redesigned later on so I would have to draw them again from scratch. I also found I didn't like the positioning and facing-direction of them as they were 1/4 and 3/4 on the left and right but full on on the up and down making them look odd. I changed it so they would match. Eventually I redrew both Shadelings and Herdsmen animations, redrawing them after getting feedback from my group. I wrote notes on the spritesheets in practise so others could visualise the movement and give me tips on how to show what I was trying to make. I tested them in unity once I had learnt how to.

I planned out the animations of the Shadow Walkers and Shadelings to be that they could not fully control their form and had trouble holding shape so they would move as shadows using weapons and such or moving completely on the ground and having them sink and evaporate to show the character of the race and their origins. I wanted the animation to show a subtle character or story that would be missing without it. I especially wanted their deaths to be some-what tragic. I wanted for them to be clinging to the mortal realm and trying their hardest not to die when their death animation is triggered. I animated them in rough first as keyframes, then tweened it, i then tested it in-prototype and after that I made adjustments to the sizes and changes and eventually filled in the lines and coloured it, i found new ways to make it fit the style guide when working on it, using filters and layer options after testing it for glows and outlines. I had made redesigns and colour scheme choices before drawing it and made fixes before the final. I changed the colour scheme to make it sharper after testing it in-game and finding which suited best, also asking team members for their opinions. Eventually some of the Gruk designs were finished so I could start with the rough of those while I finished up the Shadow Walkers.

TBS: style guide

When making the decision on the style we had all the artists and myself go away separately and draw the same character from Banner Saga in our styles and in a style that we would like to see in the game. Mine was in my style but with extra colouring choices. Eventually we decided on my basic style with just cell colour and some cell shading to make it pop out from the painted backgrounds our background artist was making.

We were inspired by many games and art styles, some artists made a mood board and I made a mood board on colour-schemes.

I worked on redesigning the already existing designs into the style guide and photoshopped designs for how the game would viuablly look. I animated important parts to show how the animations would function and focused on the designs that would be included, there would be 3 different art styles, one for speaking-sprites (the most detailed ones), one simpler version of that in the battle screen, and a very simplified version for the grid screen that would represent the characters being a lot smaller.

I made designs for talking sprites

Examples of the grid animations using various background to make sure it's compatible.

Example of the battle screen

I then drafted out instructions and details with the image examples when writing up the style guide.

I showed examples of the anatomy style and detailed how to recreate it for the other artists.