Animation and Assets creation
Gabriel Pettersson, Character Animator
Gro Memory is a game for handheld devices like iPhone and Samsung Galaxy. It is a game for children, and designed to appeal to kids both with a cute and beautiful art style, and to deliver a message that we need no take care of the environment and the animals.
My job was to animate the characters in the game and to some extent parts of the gameplay mechanics.
The art is all done in hand drawn 2d images by Gabrielle Nilsson.
In order to animate it, everything had to be cut up into individual pieces. Where necessary I edited the textures or added to it.
The body, arms, tail, head and anything else that should move was moved into a texture atlas, positioned to make the most use of the texture-space.
Since handhelds have limits in memory and processing power, this ensured that many assets could share one large texture and not needing to load many separate texture files.
To further optimize game-performance I created a model-system to create as many parts as I needed and then merge them into one.
This meant that every character could have individual planes with their own UV-mapped textures.
I then combined all planes into one 3D-mesh. This is basically the same thing as creating a full 3D-mesh one limb at a time and then merging them. Here it was necessary due to the high quality of the Artwork.
The model was then rigged, weighted and then animated in Maya. Most of the animation was done in Unity 3D after the model had been exported as a FBX. Some was made in Maya directly and then exported.
The workflow is similar, but Maya gives a more flexible and more hands-on animation.
In some cases it was required to replace parts of the animation with different textures, like blinking eyes. Since this is not 3D, I used hidden planes to swap between faces, eyes and such. With Unitys animation blending it worked out really well.
It was a really fun ride and very challenging and educational to change perspective from computer to handhelds. I am very proud of the final product and very happy with the work I did as animator.
Now I am looking forward to new challenges and new projects in the near future!
Thank you for reading,
Gabriel Pettersson
Animator and 3D Artist
Please check out the game Gro Memory by following this link LINK, or visit www.groplaydigital.com to find out more about the company and its projects.
