One of the ways we made the Corrupted Castle stand out in terms of style was through the animation style we used. Characters and enemies within the game are animated using stepped animations, meaning that the model does not interpolate or glide smoothly between poses. The lack of interpolation leads to the models having a "stop-motion" effect as they move and is very satisfying to look at, so I want to document a few of the "lessons learned" while creating the animations for the game.

Lesson #1- Animate down the chain:

One of the time methods I used to save time while animating was to focus keyframes on elements further down a characters joint chain. For example, a characters shoulder would be animated on 4's  while a characters elbow would be animated on 2's. Working this way allowed me to keep my motion seeming solid and fluid while not having to update and keyframe every joint of a character every other frame, saving a lot of time. Keeping this rule in mind also helped me follow the next rule.

Lesson #2- Watch your arcs:

When trying to save time and not animate every joint every frame, I initially tried to animate joints asynchronously from each other. However, when I would play the animation back, the motion looked very off, like the momentum in a characters body part was being stopped momentarily. This jitter in animation was happening because the joints arc was being interrupted by the motion of a joint higher in a chain. To get the effect I wanted, I needed to create a separate keyframe on the frame the joint was meant to be updated and move it so that it would continue its correct arc. The motion from joints higher in the chain can of course be used to your advantage when creating motion arcs, but make sure to be aware if a joints motion is being interrupted by something else.

These two lessons helped me understand how to make stop motion animations that looked good while skipping some of the heartache and pain that can go into creating 400+ frames of animation. These rules of course need to be implemented with the regular principles of animation to be made truly effective, but it was fun to explore animation through a new lens and combine my passion for 2d animation with the 3d medium I have been learning.