Captain Noleg – Harpoon throw animation
Hello! My name is Nils Folker and in this post I will write about my working process on a pair of animation keyframes that I made last week. The animation is made for the game Mermaid river. Mermaid river will be a side scrolling space shooter which among other things contain: evil mermaids, evil fish and a crippled pirate that struggles to get he’s gold back.
The task given was to make keyframes for a harpoon throwing animation. An idle animation was already made for the character so I used it as foundation for the throwing animation. To get the right pose for the animation I used some pictures of spear throwing athletes as reference.
The reference helped allot but I still had some issues with the small disconnecting fact that my character was going to throw he’s harpoon while swimming underwater (this is probably not even possible IRL). I solved it by simply combining the throwing motion of the upper body with an exaggerated swimming motion of the lower body. The legs paddling motion looked off because they were not affected by the upper body’s movement. In the second keyframe I instead made a motion that followed the movement of the whole body.
I think the part that I find the most difficult is to animate the torque of the upper body and maintain the characters shapes and expressions. This added allot of extra time to rework and clean up. To become better of course more animating is useful, but also the adding of basic shape construction to the character should make it easier to imagine what the result of a movement should be. For these kinds of characters with allot of rotation maybe a turnaround could help out.
So far the animation feels solid and I am happy with how the frames turned out. I am not satisfied with the amount of time that it took and think that a optimization of the working process is needed. The craft of animation is rather new to me and allot is to be learned. I feel optimistic about my future work and will later on make other animations with the same character.
These two keyframes is what will be presented at the alpha version of the game. I look forward to continue my work and filling in the frames between the keys, this will be done for the beta version of Mermaid river.
folkergamedesign 
This blogpost was very well written. You have explained good about what you have done and how you did it. Something that I miss though is your mindset when it comes to decisions. You have for example written:
”To get the right pose for the animation I used some pictures of spear throwing athletes as reference.”
You have written very well that the athlete was used as an reference to how you would design the characters pose when he swims while throwing harpoons, but you haven’t explained why. Why would the athlete be the greatest reference? Why did you choose athlete as a reference instead of a diver whom throws harpoon like objects? It would be interesting to know how you made your decisions. It would have been great if you had just written some thing like:
”I couldn’t find anything of a diver throwing harpoons or something in that style so i chosed an athlete as a reference instead because it was the closest.”
or
”I chose the athlete as an reference because I just needed to know the structure for the upper body.”
One small thing I would also recomend is to have the animation picture closer to the text which describes it, just like the athlete picture. This isn’t a major thing, but it would help the reader to visualize and understand a litle more. You have othervise done a splendid job with this blogpost. Keep up with the hard work!
– Johan Persson, Group 9.
GillaGilla