Colony 7 Project - Blog 2 - Animations

We have been asked as Part of our Studio 1 projects to keep a log of achievements and issues during the process of our group assessment.

I am one of the level designers for the project.

The project is called Colony 7 the basic premise is as follows:

Concept Theme

Sci-fi adventure game with Rogue-like attributes.

Colony 7 is a 3-D Third Person Adventure, Exploration game with Rogue-like and Survival elements. A colonizing ship is sent to a distant planet and tasked with gathering resources in order to populate the planet. The journey begins when the colonists take their first steps onto the wondrous new land and build their homes but they are not alone… Colony 7 is also inhabited by hostile humanoids and many other dangers.

As the Characters are now created my next task is to animate them.

I am using Mixamo to rig and animate each character. The drawback to using mixamo is that in order to rig and animate each character, they have to have human like qualities. Such as 2 arms and 2 legs for the rigging process to work. This restricted my creative process but it also gave me boundaries to work within.

The base animations for all characters are: Idle, Walk and Run.

Rigging and getting minimal distortion on the character proved to be the challenge here. I had to load the character into mixamo, rig it then test it with various animations. If i could not find an animation that had minimal distortion i had to adjust the magica voxel file then repeat the above process until i was happy with the result. This proved to be very time consuming, but as i like to do things right the first time it worked out for the best in the end.

With the Idle animation i sort to give each character a different personality, as walking and running are very similar in motion (i did use different animations for each character according to their shape and distortion level) using the Idle animation to characterize each model worked out well.

Having the basic animations completed - Idle, Walk and Run, my next task as the attack animations are required at a later date is to Design and build the Tutorial level