Animations and working with freelancers

Hi everyone! It's been a little bit since my last blog post but I don't plan on taking 6 month between post like before... Having a kid takes up a lot of your time but he is 6 months old and it gets easier and I'm able to work on the blog and on the game.

The good news is that I've been working with some freelance artist and mainly that is just communicating back and forth so I'm able to do it quickly and on the go.

Working with an artist, one of the most important things to do is make sure you are on the same page and communication is key for this.

So what I want to do is show you some of the process that I went through with my artist to create Hyena's death animation. Here is the final result.

Final Animation

It all started with my artist suggesting that the Hyena's hair should turn brown when he dies to symbolize that his fire has gone out. I totally loved this idea, it reminded me of when a super saiyan is defeated, they go from blonde hair to black.

After this I brought up that I think he should have the pose of a dog playing dead as I thought it would be kinda cute and would fit the game's sort of humor and I sent her this reference picture.

Reference image for animation

So with these ideas in mind, the artist came back with the basic keyframes of the animation for me to review and see if we are on the right track.

Keyframe test

Overall I liked the direction but I wanted to see the Hyena more in the last frame. I asked the artist to send me a couple of different version of the last frame that would show the Hyena more, especially his face and paws.

Once I picked the one I liked she send me a revised keyframe test and we moved to the final animation with the inbetween frames and we were almost done!

Final Animation lines.. almost final

So this was really close but there was one final detail that I wanted to add... I wanted him to have a frame that he looks surprised like "wow you got me!", I was a little picky at this point haha.

Final animation, with surprised look!

With the animation done, the artist went ahead and did the color.

V1 with color

I really liked it but after I showed my wife, she made a suggestion that his hair should maybe look more burnt like charcoal with ash on top. The artist thought it was a good idea and went for it. And so we got our final animation fully colored!

Final Animation!

I hope you like this behind the scenes look at the art process for Cosmoids TD, if you want more like this let me know in the comments or on Twitter! I also could do a blog about how I found my artist and my experience working with different freelance artist.

Thanks and see you soon!