Character Animations

Play Pass

After proving we could animate characters in New and Trending Games, and it was something I enjoyed doing, I became the go-to for character animations. This knight character was built with my rigging script. I created the fire in Animate, using frame-by-frame animation.

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Walking throwing star

Walk cycles are always fun. I really liked animating the sword in this one, and drawing a circular shape to show it's spinning fast. Another interesting part of this animation was the throwing motion. Playing baseball growing up, you are taught that there is a cetrain motion where the elbow leads, then flicks from forward to back, in order to throw the ball faster. In animation terms, this means the elbow pole/constraint quickly changes from left to right. So it was fun to animate that motion here.

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Books

Run cycles are also always fun. I liked animating the character bounce off the floating barrel. I also liked animating the dive in to the ocean. With animations like this, there is always the added challenged of keeping the gif under 600 KB (Also on a transparent background!).

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Holiday gif

This was one of the earlier animations our team completed for Google Play. At this point our team was really beggining to come together and we were starting to produce some really great work.

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Watch gif

This was another fun run cycle. Not much to say, other than it was fun to do. It's always a challenge to get the run to look good. The rig used the standard script I wrote.

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Confetti gif

I really liked the way this animation turned out. I felt like the laptop, and confetti, had a lot of personality. The streamers were animated in a style that I learned from media.monks that they do really well. It was nice to emulate that.

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Overview

During 2018-2019, Google Play carried out a series of emails promoting new and trending games on the Play Store. Our job was to create engaging emails, and specifically engaging email hero gifs, for Google's customers.

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Problem

We decided we wanted to use characters in many of the animations. We had limited time and budget. We also hadn't completed many character animations in past projects. We were able to overcome these obsticals with beauitful illustrations, innovative rigs, and building a great team that worked together to come up with good solutions.

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Sonic the Hedgehog

This animation was a lot of fun. We were getting in to the grove with characters. And this animation allowed us to experiment with facial expressions, and making the character more relatable. It was a big challenge getting the physics of the spinning sonic zoom. The leaves, and the maze grounded the animation.

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Star Wars

This animation was made during the release of a Star Wars movie. In the original design, the shapes were 2D, which is typically Google Play’s brand. I felt the ships would be much more interesting if they were in 3D. I was able to model and animate the ships in Cinema 4D and use a toon shader to maintain the flat colors, but also add some physics to the ships.

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Indianna Jones

As we were making more character animations, I needed a way to quickly and efficiently rig characters. Plug-ins like duik were clunky to use. Pasting custom IK code in each limb was effective, but time consuming. So I developed a script to input the custom IK scripts in to shape layers, based on the layer name, to quickly and effectively rig characters with a lightweight rig.

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Candy Crush

With Animations like this, the illustration did a lot of the heavy lifting. Dustin me David was a great illustrator.

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