Professional animator works on subscribers' Unity games for free.

animation with animation anything is possible since the invention of the internet in the 90s its users have found all sorts of applications for animation look my favorite characters can finally get together and I've been shipping these guys for a while the possibilities truly are endless but what is animation [Music] anticipation timing and if you take the first letter of all of these it spells animation now that you're an expert in animation let's talk about animation and games specifically if you're making a game odds are it's going to have some animation or motion at the very least even a UI element appearing out of nowhere is animation in a sense and because we've been spoiled with games that don't suck without a certain amount of Animation the player might feel that your game is incomplete or cheap looking and therefore people add more animation to their games the problem is without a certain level of Polish the viewer might be unsure if they're even looking at an animation or simply having a stroke animation isn't something that generally comes naturally to people it takes a lot of practice and rarely seeing sunlight or other humans to truly become a master animator if you're someone who doesn't like sunlight or people anyway you might be an animator and you should get yourself tested but otherwise what hope is there for an independent game developer with no budget and no end animation experience when I had this thought the other day I realized that as a game developer who's also been a professional character animator I had a unique opportunity and decided to reach out to my subscribers and offer my more than 10 years of Industry animation experience for free but animating other people's games won't be easy there is a lot of stuff that I don't know like I've only done pixel art animation once so will I be able to make good animation on all these games I think that's going to be the challenge today I mean I might just make them worse so a bunch of my subscribers sent me their Unity projects of varying completeness some are in the early stages and some of them have some pretty good animation already I'm gonna see how much of a difference I can make by just adding animation the first sponsored segment because I'm partial to having money to spend on not starving well he was a very good candidate wasn't he I agree yes Jamie smelled funny and wouldn't stop screaming but he has a game development degree so I'm willing to overlook it he knew an impressive number of curse words I've been called worse the only spat on me twice well might as well send in the last guy even though they there's not much Point actually I'm already here oh very good please tell us your name some context for the audience and that you have a game development degree my name is Robert Thompson hello audience I'm here at this games company for a job interview and I don't have a game development degree gross but I mean I've released my own game and I have lots of experience in unity Aha and where did you say you learned game development the internet my God it's arranged I'm scared are you sure you don't mean some sort of online accredited degree nope just YouTube videos articles and trial and error mostly I'm scared what's wrong with you I've heard enough of this filth guards sees him all right so maybe that's not exactly what would happen but being properly educated is invaluable so I'd like to introduce the sponsor of this video Southern New Hampshire University you don't always need a degree to get a job in the games industry but speaking from personal experience there are real limitations to trying to learn Game Dev on your own the tutorials that you find on the internet aren't necessarily going to teach you good habits and you'll definitely need them if you want to work in a team every now and then I'll pick up a new bit of knowledge about programming that will make my life 100 times easier and it's probably stuff I would have learned week one on a programming course it's so hard to find the crucial information that you need to know when you don't know what the information that you need to know is I can't even say confidently that I know all the fundamentals and that's where having a structured education with capable tutors who are on hand to guide you and tell you what you're doing wrong becomes so valuable snhu has one of the largest accredited non-profit online degree offerings in the US with over 200 degree programs focused on getting you started or advancing in a career that you'll love on snhu's game development program you'll learn how to create realistic Dynamic gameplay experiences with game AI game physics 2D and 3D graphics and interface design you'll also learn computer programming languages like C plus plus c-sharp and Java courses are taught by industry experts who'll teach you to research develop and contribute to advances and Trends within the field of game programming all of snhu's programs are extremely flexible there are no set class times allowing you to work when and where you want if you already have college credits you don't have to start over snhu will let you transfer up to 90 credits towards your bachelor's degree and up to 12 credits towards your Masters so if that sounds interesting to you head to snhu.edu Robert Thompson so the first game is from Jacob Wilbanks and it's called slotshot and the project is basically the start of a very simple shooter with sort of retro arcade stylings the idea is you have a gun which is like a slot machine so you crank the lever on the back of the gun and you get a random combination of ammo and weapon so the state of the project so far is that there's a little test level to run around in you can jump shoot and Crouch and that's it and apart from when you're shooting there is no animation on the gun the existing animations are not bad actually they do look a little clunky the gun is also a little big in comparison to the body and the bullets don't actually appear to be coming from the tip of the gun so I'll fix those things in order to avoid any unforeseen complications when I'm animating I'm thinking about the style of the animation it's quite a wacky idea so I'm going to go a bit on the cartoonish side with the animation and we're going to try and keep a suggestion of the original animations in there like the massive amount of recoil did you know animators often record themselves when making animations their computer consumes this data and feeds it directly into an artificial intelligence that will one day replace them in exchange the computer promises not to crash after effects the next 15 minutes I know I said I was only going to add animation but I really want to add some arms to hold the gun and I'm going to justify that by saying that I'm not changing the gameplay in any way and the only function of the arms is to be animated so I modeled up these arms and I decided to go with a low poly model so as not to ruin the Lo-Fi arcade look of the game then once I've done that I rig them up in blender using once again Auto rig Pro the most magical add-on ever created and I made a full body rig but I just deleted all the geometry that I didn't need so I can do everything I'd be able to do with a normal rig so I can animate each joint of the fingers I can move the hand around and it's got an ik gun control I've also added controls to the gun so I can move it independently animate the slot reels and the crank on the back and I had this idea of using a mix of procedural and handmade animation so I used unity's animation rigging tools package and created some ik arms within unity and I added a script which gives the arms some weight and basically just creates like an elastic drag so that the hands and the gun take a moment to catch up to the rest of the body and they sort of wobble and settle into position and here's what it looks like in first person so you can sort of see that elastic tweening going on and you can see that as well as having just like a natural weight to the jumping if you run up small bumps down little edges then the movement of the hands sort of tell you what's happening under your feet and again no matter where you look the gun sort of behaves accordingly like if you're facing down the gun like drops down rather than just playing the same animation always relative to the camera this line I'm running over here is actually a little bit raised and you can sense that in how the arms react which I think is really cool the same goes for like bumping into walls and things you really get a sense of your position in the space so now it's actually time for some real animation the thing you clicked on the video for hooray I started by adding a run cycle and I programmed it so that when you're moving around it sticks to the animation more rather than the floppy arms and I also added some code that tilts the arms back as you're falling and the faster you fall the more the gun tilts back but I didn't like how it carried on tilting forever so I decided to ease it off when you reach a certain velocity and now I think it's looking really promising and I have put a tiny little jump animation in there but it's only affecting a character a little bit really the jump animation here is just that procedural tilt happening I also made an animation to add bit more impact to the character's Landing but again that only affects the character slightly and I'm mostly just using the procedural animation did you know if you enable time remapping on an animation in After Effects and ease time to zero you will speed now here is the shooting animation and I've added some animation to the camera as well to try and give a real sense of the strength of this recoil there's some little extra bits going on here as well the first few frames of the shot the gun sort of snaps to the center of the screen and holds there this both gives the player the impression that he's actually shooting in the center of the screen also that recoil is more effective it's hard to see but it does make a big difference and then finally I whipped up the animation for cranking the gun and starting the slot machine going and I figured that the fast spinning slots would create like a gyroscopic effect where the hand sort of has to stabilize the spinning of the heavy metal wheels in the chamber and likewise when they come to a sudden stop you get this kick that throws off the tension in your hand and I'm afraid that's it for this game I did want to get more animations done but I want to get this video out so let's move on to the next game but I thought it would also be fun to talk about my animation philosophy in this video so before we move on I want to reveal to you the Forbidden 13th principle of animation Disney even sent their goons over to silence me about this because it's so powerful that it allows just one person to complete an animated feature film on their own and that 13th principle of Animation is laziness laziness is a very underrated tool the main drawback of Animation is that it takes a long time and game development is already an incredibly time consuming Venture and for that reason I often choose very simple characters to animate and really what I do is pretty similar to a Disney Animation except that I leave out the hair clothes eyeballs nose ears Anatomy color shading proportions consistency intelligence volume and soul it's the same as Disney except this takes a few seconds and this takes all of my sanity laziness even cancels out other principles of animation anime artists have known this for a long time I don't see any follow-through or overlapping motion on these arms or any motion yet this isn't just considered acceptable it's iconic just get rid of anticipation completely and you've got a super Snappy start to a run that fills your character with energy not the ghibli's animation is lazy because God damn but especially when you're doing complex animation it's good to save energy where you can in fact why do a proper Run Cycle at all when you can just zoom in and move a still image up and down slightly I bet anybody watching from Disney right now is feeling pretty foolish but even Disney knows the power of laziness famously reusing old shots that's right you can just reuse animation you showed already and no one will even notice few people know this but the 2016 film Moana is just Finding Nemo played in Reverse okay so it's not quite as simple as be lazy and you will get a good result exhibit a it's more like imagining all the things you could possibly add and then as much as possible not doing that pixel art is a good example there was a time where pixel art was simply a symptom of limitations and its possibilities opened up we naturally moved away from it and there are plenty of people who with those limitations removed came back to it anyway and I believe that what's happening when somebody chooses to work in a pixel art style is that whether consciously or subconsciously you're looking at all the possibilities of things you could be doing with more pixels more detail more processing power and then saying but I don't need any of that of course all you're actually thinking is pixel art looks good let's do that and I really believe not often enough do people think simple animation is good let's do that or I don't need more complex animation to make it look good when the truth is simple shapes with simple movements are often way more appealing than whatever you'd end up with trying to add more complexity so the next time that you find yourself manically adding keyframes in order to fix your animation try removing some instead and on the subject of Simplicity the next game is one with pixel art and this is by Oliver Rowe and Aiden Erickson it's a straightforward 2D platformer with a really nice character controller the working title is video game fantastic it looks like it might have been inspired by Celeste or at least inspired by the kind of games that inspired Celeste so I'm already a big fan and this time it's already a complete Game pretty much you can play it all the way to the end it's got Secrets it's got various different platforming mechanics like a double jump Springs crumbling platforms and some of the animations are actually really good already it's got satisfying particle effects it's got a nice simple death effect a really nicely animated checkpoint and various other cool animations so it's not like I'm going to be redoing everything from the ground up but despite having all this cool animation the biggest things that stand out to me actually are the run and the jump I think we can hopefully improve those quite a lot so let's get started so I started my version of the Run by adding the head you can see if I slow this right down I'm holding the frame at the top and the bottom and this is sort of a principle of pixel animation when you're working on this tiny grid of pixels you don't have the space to make something ease in and out because the minimum distance something can move is one pixel which is quite far yet pixel artists managed to make things look like they're moving subtly so you kind of have to look at the pixels that you've got and a lot of the time just fake it so next I added the hood and once again this hood is like two pixels high but all you can do is use timing and count on the brain to make up the rest so that it looks fluid and not static did you know the word animation stems from the Latin animation foreign [Music] I've got the jacket and I tried to make it look like it was flapping open and closed and then I roughed out the feet placements a lot of the time when you're animating it's enough to make sure that just the extremities are moving nice and smoothly and in smooth arcs and then adding the connecting joints in later sort of seals the deal I had to really get creative with some of these leg shapes though because not much to work with when you're working at this scale and the same for the hands just block them out and then connect with the arms and I was really trying to keep a strong silhouette then I shored up his proportions a little bit and stuck him in the game though he'd lost some of his old look so I decided to shove his head forward a bit more to be more reminiscent of that old hunched over run then it was time to move on to the jump I found this old animation in the project files that didn't end up getting used it looks like the devs just opted to use the double jump animation for both the jumps but this has its own problems as the silhouette kind of gets lost it looks kind of like the hooded jacket turns into her hair I see what they're going for though so let's see if we can clean this up so I tried to redo it but it was honestly pretty difficult like I'm not surprised that they got stuck but I think I managed to come up with a half decent jump animation and I've got the jacket flapping as you fall down as well so not bad the double jump though I think could still be improved because here's the current roll animation and again it looks like they had trouble with this and they ended up only using a couple of the frames because I guess they weren't happy with the rest of them did you know the earliest examples of Animation are Paleolithic cave drawings dating back 32 000 years if only the artist's primitive caveman mind could have comprehended what wonders the cavemen of the future would create and here's my updated role slash double jump I really had to just open my third eye for this one looking back I couldn't tell you why I placed certain pixels where or even why it works but it does thankfully I'm much more happy with the double jump animation than I am with the jump and yeah I don't think there's a lot more that I want to change I had a quick look at the spring animation because it looked like it was speeding up a bit weirdly I really like the smear lines and stuff but if it were me I just make it super instant and then those nice smears add to it in a more subtle way but I gave it a go anyway in their style to try and smooth it out make it a bit more springy more sudden going up and softer coming down I actually also noticed his Landing could look a bit better currently he's Landing with totally straight legs and it looks like he's breaking his knees every time so I added a couple of frames of Landing to make it a bit easier on his knees and that's pretty much it I really loved working on this game I think the style is really strong the movement's really strong who knows maybe they'll be inspired to carry it on now that they've got a few new animations but anyway let's move on to the next game the next game was sent to me by Max and this is a simple 3D platformer that's reminiscent of Nintendo 64 era games and Max has told me that he really doesn't like animating he finds it a long and painful process and I only have one thing to say about that don't be alarmed that indicates only that you're still saying but Max I think there's a lot to like about what you've done already here the Run Cycle especially is actually really Charming so I won't replace that animation but I will see if I can improve it and honestly everything else here is pretty solid I think we can make some things a bit more Dynamic and expressive and give things a bit more weight and impact but I don't want to change the style here at all this Crouch walk is really the only thing that I would say looks wrong there is a dive animation but there's a problem with the camera which makes it a little bit too broken so I'm not going to touch that but I'm really happy that somebody submitted a 3D platformer and I think this will be fun to work on so let's do it the first thing I noticed was that the animation controller is an Unholy mess and overall just a very familiar sight because I did exactly the same thing in my devlog series but we're not going any further till we've cleaned this up so there we go that's much simpler and now let's look at the Run animation this is the animation curve for the upper part of the leg and you can see that there's just keyframes everywhere ideally you want to have as little keyframes as you can a lot of animators starting out try to like Brute Force the motion by putting keyframes everywhere but in general momentum velocity acceleration rotational velocity are best defined with smooth curves because body parts don't just speed up and slow down without a good reason and you might just get away with tweaking billions of keyframes until it kind of looks right but it'll still be obvious even to the untrained eye even if they don't know what is wrong with the animation there'll probably still be a degree of jerkiness which is hard to hide so you want to simplify everything as much as you can so here is that simplified version of the curve it's I've tweaked it slightly but as you can imagine this will be smoother it will also be easier for me to visualize what this curve is actually doing you can see another common animation problem here the head is only bobbing backwards and forwards on every right step so it looks a bit uneven unbalanced if there's a movement that's happening on the Torso or the head on one step then on the other side when the other footsteps that movement should also be happening so if we just double up the movements here then the head Bob looks a lot more natural did you know that all gestic colonismus is the most underrated animation on the internet that's not even a joke that's just a fact so here we've smoothed out the legs increased the movement on the head and increase the up and down movement on the whole body but I want him to sort of spring off the floor a bit so I'm going to make these keyframes a bit sharper here and once that's done he'll spend more time in the air than he does on the floor so it'll look a bit floaty and similarly we can widen the keys at the top so that he spends even more time in the air and therefore looks nice and cartoony so there we go the run's looking all right I like the bounciness but it kind of bothers me how much the head is moving it's like locked to the body in reality there'd be some elasticity between the head and the neck and I think because it's so cartoony we can exaggerate that and make the head sort of stabilized while the body's going up and down more vigorously underneath it so I did that and I thought I'd lost something of the original runs Charming stiffness so I tried to tone it back to being less exaggerated I think the fact that the run is so upright and things aren't moving from side to side in any way it's possibly making it look a bit basic I don't know I want to add some sideways movement somewhere and see if it helps so here we go I've added some subtle side to side movement I also slowed the run down a bit and delayed the arm swing a tiny bit and a bunch of other things I can't really remember now everything that I did but now I'm just going to jump ahead and finish all the rest of the animation and show you the result so here you can see I've flip-flopped on the run and sped it up a bit I added a new Skid animation I added a Crouch animation which kind of bounces as you settle all there's a new Jump animation which has like a lot of squash and stretch on it and makes his body look nice and Squishy I made various tweaks to the run and I added a Crouch walk animation which is for some reason always my favorite part of doing these 3D character animations I think because Crouch walking is not something people really do that much in real life you have more license to make it look a bit Goofy and unbalanced got a new long jump animation and there's some animation for when he lands there was some before but I've sort of made it a bit more impactful and bouncy then of course we've got the new idle animation which I think is kind of cute with all these animations I tried to keep that sort of very basic Nintendo at 64 aesthetic and also now when you fall off Ledges he transitions into a falling animation which is shown very subtly here when you fall small distances and a bit more obviously off of tall ledges so yeah I'm pretty happy with this once again it was so fun to work on this and I'm gonna leave it there I think thank you to everyone who sent me their games I'm sorry I didn't get to work on a lot of them this stuff takes a long time and I always forget exactly how long it takes big thank you to all my patrons you guys are amazing patreon's been set up for a while but this is the first video I'm actually charging for so from now on there's going to be lots more updates and I'll also be finally opening the new Patron only Discord so if you want to get in on that get an animation in the credits get a drawing in the credits or just get your name in the credits head on over to patreon and help support the channel thank you so so much I'll see you in the next one foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Robert Thomson

Views: 407,127

Keywords: Devlog, Indie Devlog, Game Dev, Programming, Game Developer, Indie Dev, Indie Games, Indie Game, Indie Gamedev, Dev, Unity, Unity Devlog, Unity Developer, Game, Games, Gaming, Game Jam, Platformer, 3D Platformer, Indie Platformer, 3D, Animation, Animator, YouTube Animator, Gamedev Youtuber, Subscriber Special, puzzle game, puzzle, cryptic, captain toad, baba is you, developer, solo dev

Id: gYDueQuv6Pk

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022