First Animation Test

After doing some thinking, I plan out the best way to handle the animation.  I will be building each frame of the sprite as a separate object in Maya, then animate it by turning one object “on” and the previous one “off”.

This is similar to what’s called “replacement” animation in stop-motion.  For instance, Stop Motion (i.e. Aardman) characters have between a handful and a hundred different mouths, each sculpted into a different shape-

These shapes are replaced frame by frame (hence the name “replacement” animation).  When the animation is played back at real time, the planned changes of each replaced mouth create the illusion that the mouth is morphing into the phonemes and expressions that the animator wants to convey.

Lions from chadcarter on Vimeo.

In a normal CG character animation situation, these mouth shapes would be built as “blend shapes” where the animator would distort the base model of the face into the various shapes, record them, and let the computer interpolates the changes to make up the frames in between.

This results in a smooth morph between each shape.  Since I am attempting to emulate the feel of static pixels turning on and off, I am opting for the stop-motion method of animating instead of the usual CG methods.

I duplicate the first sprite I created in 3D, and shift the cubes around to create a new object that serves as the next frame (replacement shape) in the animation.  Luckily, in researching the sprite online, I find it only has 3 frames of animation-

Within Maya, I create each frame as a separate object (group of cubes)-

 I then parent all of the frame objects to a curve and add an attribute to the curve called “frame”. 

I use Set Driven Keys to attach each frame (object) to a number in the “frame” attribute, the visibility of all objects is the driven attribute, so that if “frame” is set to 2, object 2 is the only visible object, If “frame” is set to 3, object 3 is the only object, etc.

This creates a run cycle that has the look of sprite animation.  Rather than morphing or rotating in 3 dimensions between the keyframes, one arrangement of cubes is replaced by another in sequence, emulating the look and feel of one frame of a sprite replacing another.

Untitled from Joshua Miller on Vimeo.

Now I have one control curve that I can use to move the animated sprite around in space, and an attribute on that curve that can be used to switch between frames of the 3D “sprite”.

The arrangement of cubes in every frame of the test isn’t perfect, but it’s a good enough proof of concept to move forward with planning a scene.