And He's Done.

All done! (I hope)

Got the walking cycle animation finished the other day, put everything together and linked the buttons up to the frames. (hint: when you want to move frames in the main timeline from a MovieClip, use the '_root.' action, works awesomely.)

Here's the final product:

Interactive Character Model Sheet

In reflection, I would have liked to add a few more animations to the mix, but the ones that I did were quite a task for me, plus I spent alot of time designing the character itself and getting the presentation right before I started the animation.

Also, if I was more experienced in the program I would have liked to use some of the animation techniques I tried before in the project, with the heads/body turning and stuff, but it just didn't seem like a feasible option to take for animating my character as I may have gone of the deadline if I'd have took that route.

Nearly Finished, I Think?

Nearly finished up with the work, just gotta do some final tweaks here and there... Looking good though, right? Nice and clean how I wanted it, I also decided I could have some little things going on in the background maybe, like something rolling past... Just something to make it more 'fun'. I did end up going with the "pull" tab at the top in the end, it just seemed to work best, the button seemed to just look out of place when the menu wasn't there.

I'm nearly finished with the walk cycle though, this is the hardest thing I've had to animate. Especially when I realised I drew the character in a 3/4 pose and can't directly take the walk cycle I did ealier in the project.

You can see here how I'm having a tough time because I pretty much have to redraw the leg each time I want it to move, and not just tween it.

Other than this, I'm getting along steady, I have two animations done, Standing Still (not so much an animation, but I have him breathing/blinking/etc, so it sort of counts) and Waving (which I'm quite pleased with), the last one, Dance, shouldn't be too hard I think.

Oh yeah, also I have some sound in the movie, he says "hey" when he waves and I added in a feature that you can move the menu back up once it's been pulled down (just press the tab again), it was getting sort of annoying having it still there when you're trying to watch the animations.

Making a start.

Made a start on the interface already, want to get it nice and clean looking, don't want to have the user trying to figure out where to go to press something.

This is the simple idea I have, it's a bit like the background in the onion animation I did (actually, I stole the idea off of it) but I placed a couple of black bars at the top and bottom to give a widescreen effect. Want I want to have is the character stood in the middle with a simple drop shadow effect underneath, I think this will look really nice.

I actually got the menu design down earlier too, which I'm liking... I'm thinking of having either a button to press to make the menu come down from the top or this little thing at the bottom so you can press it as though it's pulling it down, I've put "pull" on the tag itself though, so the user knows what to do with it.

Character Sheets.

Okay, so I've finished designing the two characters, and I just need to pick one now!

I'm most likely going to be going for the character on the left (Tyrone) as I think he'd stand out more when I animate him compared the the right character (Francis) which is sort of dull with his dark clothes and shoes.

I'll be making a start on the interface for this project soon, I'm thinking something quick minimal, with a drop-down menu or something? We'll see.