Character in Perspective

Finished Piece:

swf file:  http://www.fastswf.com/iuw8npk

The process

To make the character in perspective I had to go around it like making a bouncing ball in perspective

But on this project I had to resize and keyframe each time the frame was on hold otherwise it would look like the character is growing on spot and sliding on the ground.

Like in the example above. To prevent that first I had to key out the keyframes where he anticipates the jump and when he jumps from the spot.

I used onion skin to make this process easier so I could measure the sizes correctly.

Afterwards I was just testing the animation to see if everything is correct, if it wasn't I was tweaking the sizes and positions so it would flow properly.

I finished it off by making a dummy symbol and putting all layer information into it so I'd have a smaller file with the same information, that I can also move freely.

I went inside the symbol to paste the frames and as a result I got a dummy symbol that is animated

I had to make a note on the point in the middle, it needs to be in the centre, the pivot point, for animation to keep its place, if it is moved somewhere else animation will go towards the pivot point instead.

Here's an example what the animation with pivot point moved looks like.

Top one is the animation with pivot point moved into different places.

Bottom one is with its pivot point in the centre.

Pivot point can be put to its original position with free transform tool(Q)

Once it is reajusted the animation will go back to normal

Finished animation

After dealing with some issues I managed to finish the character with successful jump and everything working correctly.

The colours are little bit faded on the .gif export so I uploaded additional .sfw file onto fastswf.com which can be viewed here:

http://www.fastswf.com/F1z7iKs 

Animation Process

During the process of animation I was referencing to the previous project which was the jumping bunny character. I used it as a guide for my own jumping character in how it was built and how it was animated.

Which looks like this when it's animated and tweened

I also references to different jump cycles to make sure everything is correct

I started off the character build with a sphere for head and body and shaped it out

I made it into a symbol and created features inside to stay still while I move the character around to place it in order.

                I went outside the symbol to create arms and legs. Arms and legs are shapes, so they'll be easier to bend and move around. The rest of the parts are symbols so they stay consistent throughout the animation,

I lined up each keyframe with the modifications and applied tweens and easing to them.

I have done the movement of facial features separately inside the Symbol of the body

and applied the same principles with movable parts being shapes and things I want consistent being symbols.

I used classic tweens and shape tweens to add more motion to my character.

During the animation process of my character I experienced some problems with shape tweening, where the shapes were going crazy. I had to apply the Shape Hints to get them to work. With tweening on my character's ears I had to use 2 Hints instead of 1 because it would not work otherwise

I have also applied easing to make the character look like he's affected by gravity.

Character Design

I made a sketch of the character and colour coded the different movable parts and placement of them on the layers.. along with writing down the colour scheme

The finished character design looks like this

The character concept

I decided for the character to be a bull, so I began researching various cartoony bull characters and flash animated characters as reference to help me out in the project.