Over the past couple of weeks I have been learning about two programs that deal with animation. These two programs are Adobe After Effects CC and Adobe Animate CC. My initial thoughts about these two programs are very different. This might be because of the difference in difficulty of the two animations I made in each program. My initial thoughts on Adobe After Effects CC are that it is that it is a useful program and that it can be used for many things. For example I made a motion graphic describing myself and because my family is from Italy, I decided to add a pizza as a background. My experience with Adobe Animate CC was much more rough. My project was to create a monster eating a blob of food. When I started I had to draw the body using the pen tool and then animate it appropriately. However, when I added the shape tweens it would twist and move in an unwanted manner. Normally you could just add some shape hints and that would fix the problem but for some reason when I added shape hints it just made it worse. To solve the problem I had to redraw the whole thing. This was not the only problem I encountered, I also had trouble with the easing but that was solved by reapplying the easing after restarting Adobe Animate CC. Although I found more problems with Adobe Animate, I found that there are more options with Animate than After Effects, such as the use of symbols. This allowed for me to animate more abstract shapes without using shape hints. This saved a lot of time and helped facilitate many different portions of the monster. Overall I found Animate more useful but more problematic than After Effects.
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Clash Royale is a game made by Supercell that has many similar aspects to the game Clash Of Clans. Clash Royale was released on January 4, 2016. As soon as it came out there were many players already. This was mostly because Supercell had already made Itself known with the game Clash Of Clans. This attracted many players very early on and caused the game to be successful from the beginning. Supercell tried to bring it's audience from Clash Of Clans by implementing many similar aspects from Clash Of Clans to Clash Royale. For example, both games use similar troops to fight. They both have the wizard, valkyries, archers, barbarians, etc. Although both games have many similar characters, the gameplay is very different. Clash Of Clans is based on on building up your own village to stop attackers from getting your resources while Clash Royale is based on placing troops down stop stop the opponent from destroying your towers. Clash Of Clans is a much more slow paced game because while you are playing there is not much to do while in Clash Royale you can constantly battle. This causes Clash Royale to be played for more time at a time while Clash Of Clans is usually played for only 10-15 minutes in a row. Depending on the person this can be a good thing or a bad thing because if you tend to like games that are more relaxing and calm, you would probably prefer Clash Of Clans, while if you like games that are more skill based and faster paced, you would probably like Clash Royale more. Overall these two Supercell games have many differences but have some similarities that show how they are related.
Over the past couple of weeks I have started to learn how to use the program Adobe Animate CC. My first impression of this program was that it is fairly simple to understand and use. For example if you do something once and you want to do the same thing again it is not hard to remember what steps you took, actually I usually only needed to do something once before I had it memorized. This makes learning how to use this program effectively much easier. Although it was simple to understand, it had many problems when I actually tried to animate something. Over the course of two weeks I made an animation of a monster eating some sort of blob that flew in from off the screen. During this project I had many problems. The most annoying problem was that sometimes when I was trying to move a certain object in a certain way it would "guess" the tweens incorrectly. Normally this would not be a problem but for some reason whenever I tried to add any shape hints to try and fix the problem, it made the problem worse. This was extremely annoying because there was no solution that I could find without deleting the whole part. This made me lose time that I did not have. Another problem was that about 50% of the time I added an easing to an animation it would not work and again the only way to fix that was to reanimate the part. These two problems together made me lose much time that I needed. Although these problems wasted time, overall, Adobe Animate CC had many good qualities such as it's simpleness and the many different tools you had to your disposition. A tool I really found useful was the use of symbols. This made animating certain parts much easier because it did not require using shape hints. Overall Adobe Animate CC is a useful program but has many different problems that can affect your work time put in.
Idle animations are little movements that a character in a video game does when the player has not moved in a bit of time. These animations can be complex or simple depending on what the artist is going for. For example, in the game Sonic CD, the character Sonic The Hedgehog impatiently taps his foot while glaring at the player and after a longer time he ends the game saying "Your plumber MCM could never." This is a fairly simple idle animation compared to Earthworm Jim. In Earthworm Jim, the character does many different movements such as jumping rope with his stretchy head, throwing his gun in the air and letting it fall on his head, showing off his muscles and then his pants fall down showing his underwear with hearts on it, etc. These idle animations are all very creative and unique and do not necessarily have to be complex and hard to make. An idle animation that shows this is in Aladdin. When standing still he throws an apple in the air an catches it repeatedly. This shows how the character is calm and patient, and is willing to wait a little compared to Sonic's glaring and foot tapping. Many professionals say they prefer Earthworm Jim's idle animation because it is creative and was different from most other idle animations. My favorite idle animation is probably Mario's in the game Mario 64 because it really shows how he is a lazy plumber who is basically being forced to go through many difficult places to save the princess. I also like it because it is fairly relatable, if I was forced to do nothing for a long time I know that I would try to fall asleep. Overall, idle animations can show a characters personality and their style.
Citations “What Makes a Great Idle Animation? Devs Share Their Favorites.” Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games, 11 Feb. 2019. |
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My name is Vinicio Maresca and my family is from Italy, however, I was born in the US. I will be adding to this blog page as time goes by.
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The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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