Tiger

Now that Jenny and I had a good pipeline going I got the animals in .png format like the one above, pulled into pieces and textured. I then put this into photoshop and cropped out each piece like the one below. This meant that when I imported all the pieces into flash I had full control of each part of the Tigers body, meaning I could animate any part necessary.

When I put the pieces into flash I also put in a base image of the Tiger assembled into how it was supposed to look. The base image was sometimes smaller than the pieces of the tiger meaning I would have to size them down.

Once in Flash I would make the animation. The Tiger had two states of animation. An idle, for when he sits on the platform and a happy/freed state for when Jamie gets near to it/it becomes freed. I wanted to keep the frame rates for the animations, all the animations for all the characters low, less than 20 frames as in the first project I had animations that were 40 frames and this meant that the game crashed and the animated character would not go into the game. I also made it so that the animations would be able to loop in a cycle, removing the necessity for large numbers of frames. 

In the idle animation I decided that the head, eyes, tail and feet should move. I tried to do more such as animate the whiskers but when I did this it looked like there was too much animation going on. The head would move from side to side in a quizzical manner, to create the look of confusion, why is the Tiger here? I also enlarged the eyes slightly, giving the Tiger a look of innocence. This was also further conveyed with the animation of his legs and tail. These move in a playful manner, like what would happen if Tiger cubs were playing in real life. 

I looked at a couple of youtube videos of Tigers playing with each other. Their movement was mostly through their tails, which would flick about during the playing, and their feet which would flail about in swipes at other Tigers. Their movements were also very fluid and easy albeit in a clumsy fashion. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5nkNlQU_RI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZsMtwLF9Z4&feature=relmfu

The end result was an animation of a baby tiger which had a sadness and innocence about it, wanting the user to save the animal, to avoid having it be hurt. The animation also conveyed the playful and youthfulness of tiger cubs. The final stage in making the animation was exporting out each frame and then sizing it down to between 100 and 200 pixels in both width and height. These were the sizes which Lucas said were the best for the game. To do this I would open the image in photoshop and resize it in the image size function.