Squirrelly

A test design/animation of a squirrel mutant

It. Lives. AGAIN!

I started getting into pixel art lately, and naturally the first thing I did was kick out some Mutant Monday concepts.

I'm still feeling out the style, but I can really imagine creating the entire game in this style, and it solves a lot of problems I had been anticipating.

Dare I say that Mutant Monday IS BACK ON, MUTANTFUDGERS!?

Robot Cameraman!

Hey my robot cameraman works!

There is absolutely no animation on this camera, not even coded animation.  That is to say, the way it moves is not defined by positions and rotations relative to time, but rather some behavioral logic driven by the distance between 2 subjects.

My goal was to create a fully automated camera for wideshots that can keep 2 subjects in frame no matter how they are positioned.

I added 2 attributes that allow me to swing the camera behind either of the 2 subjects, and swing it above or below them.  All the animated transitions are simply the camera blending between 2 presets into these attributes, based on how far they are from each other.  Creating one of these camera moves, such as "DROP_AND_ROTATE1", requires only that I enter 4 values into a function.

This is me testing the limits to this system.  Later I'll make a few different systems that can handle some other types of compositions and moves.

First Animation: Sonny's run cycle

I haven't updated in a bit because I got booked for an After Effects job.  But now I'm back! (For a few days before a long booking)
Had a chance to rig Sonny and here he is running.  I can do some facial animation with him too but it wasn't needed for the run cycle.  But at the end of the video you can see me toggle on his "constipated face" a few times.

While animating him, I adjusted his shaders a little.  I know I said I wasn't going to do toon lines, and technically I didn't so hooray for me, but I ended up using a basic toon shader over his hands, face, and body that creates a shadow near the edge, kinda like a toon line.  For those of you familiar with maya, this is similar to facing angle ramp "xray shader".

Stay tuned for more soon!

ONE DOWN

Sonny Boyboy has now been modeled, textured, and shaded!

He's wearing is angry face here, but I set him up to have an animatable face.  His brows are normally not angry like this.  They animate on a bone system (once i've created it), so there are infinite possibilities as to what those brows can do, and will be able to smoothly transition between poses.

His eyes and mouth will use a replacement system (set up as a texture atlas), so they'll snap into preset drawings.  Currently he can have 25 different eye/mouth expressions, but if needed that can easily be increased to 100.

I had to use 4 different shaders with 4 textures to get the style to translate exactly.  Normally I would try for 1 or 2 shaders, but he's going to be getting a ton of close up camera time from different angles, so I figured there's other places I can cut corners.

Boy meets Mutant

Action pose! / Style test

I think I messed up the boy's proportions a little.  THIS is why I started doing 3D art in the first place!  No need to redraw the same thing correctly more than once.

When drawing this rendering style, I wanted to stick to principles that could be recreated exactly in 3D, without the need to write custom shaders.  I think I can remake this exact frame within the Unity3D engine.  ...and that actually sounds like exactly what I wanna do next!

I wanted to see if you could avoid using 3D toon lines (as an aesthetic choice, not a technical one).  Kept the lines and shadows the same color so they would bleed into each other.  One of the nice effects to using flat colors.  Hopefully the flat color look will help make it easier to sell the gooeyness of things by allowing meshes and particles to appear connected simply by sharing the same color.

First Sketches

Our Hero: Sonny Boyboy?

Is that a lazy name?  Well, that might end up being his name.

Strainer on his head?  Check.  Pajama oney?  Check.  Kitchen cleaver katana...oh yes

And our first Mutant: Dave.  Definitely calling him Dave.

Also a couple variations featuring metal and wooden armor.  Not sure about the LOD on all that.