Today we’d like to introduce you to our process of making a stop-motion animation. In one of the previous updates, we’ve explained what stop-motion animation is and why are we using it in our game.
This is how we prepare each asset:
1. The whole process starts with the Game Designer. They prepare a documentation with all animations needed for the specific part of the game. There are several types of animations for example: idle animation, talking, specific animation for beginning or end of the conversation and custom animation.
2. Then the animator prepares everything that was requested in the specification in an animation software (we use Toon Boom Harmony for that). First comes the rough sketch, then the more detailed lineart and some colors and shadows at the end.
3. When the animation is ready, the animator exports each frame as a separate file. Our animations have usually 80 frames on average, so it’s a lot of files to export! Those files are put into our inhouse tool that does all the magic – cropps them, sets the frame’s size and creates a file that manages animating all the cropped images.
4. Now it’s time for the Level Designer. They use the graph you see below (a kind of a state diagram) to control which animation should be used in which state (e.g., idle or end of the conversation) by referencing the files generated during step 3.
And that’s all! Don’t forget to add Irony Curtain to wishlist to stay updated!
