Unity: Ruby's Adventure Lesson 3

 17/04/23

I continued working on the project with the goal in mind to get two scenes finished today. To make the sheep scene I first added the 2nd view of the car, rotated it to match the previous scene and painted a simple background. I then added some details to the background (some grass and colour variation) then drew a sheep, I had to draw the sheep on separate layers so I could animate the parts like the legs easily (in hindsight I could have put each leg on a different layer, but I didn’t which made it take a little longer) the sheep would turn into a cloud so I animated the body and head lifting slightly and then the legs wiggling.

I then made a parent animation which made the sheep become transparent and go off the screen. I had to separate the layers again here (using the option which separates them) and used the alpha effect to make the transparency animation and I also added a scale and move animation.

Once I was done I converted it into a classic tween. I also made the legs and head go transparent before the body since they used darker colours (so the legs were seen under the body which looked strange ) and because then it looked more like a cloud. Once I was happy with the animation I added more sheep to the scene and used transform > horizontal flip to make some face the other way. I didn’t want to overcomplicate this scene so that was all I added aside from the car animation. 

I then started working on the boat scene, this ended up being a 10-second-long animation which I would have to make space for in the scene timeline. The first thing I did was the background. I added some sand, a path and some water but I realised the layout/spacing wouldn’t really allow the car to be shown properly on both sides of the background (since I wanted it shown both on land and in the water) so I made the background wider and made an animation which moved it.

I also decided the sea was a bit too static so I animated some waves moving and changing transparency. This made the background a bit more realistic yet still the sort of cartoonish style I was going for. I then started animating the car turning into the boat. This was quite challenging. I first made a copy of the car (to turn into the animation) then started with the wheels and the lights, which wouldn’t be on the boat. I animated these to disappear using the alpha, however for the back parts of the wheels (which were behind the main body of the car) I made them look like the rest of the wheel and animated them going up so it looked like the wheels were getting stored rather than just vanishing.

I also made a life ring which I made appear, this was to maintain a circle in the design similar to the design of the car where the wheels were. I then started animating the body of the car, which I didn’t want to change too much but I had to make it look a bit more like a boat and I had to get rid of the shape that went around the wheels.

I knew I had to use a shape tween, however, like before when I tried to use it for the elephant's water spray it swaps around the points used sometimes and therefore it doesn’t look right. After shortening the animation and adding an extra frame in between I got it to work quite well. I then did the same for the shadows, however for one of the shadow layers it really didn’t want to work so I had to add a few more frames in between and left a small part without the tween.

Once I was happy with the boat I made a copy of it to use for the next scene and also in this scene. I added the boat/car into the current scene and added keyframes where I swapped the symbol from car to car/boat animation to boat so that the animation happened while it was in the middle of the scene.

The last thing I did to this scene was to add some water splashes and ripples, I ended up using the onion skin option and re-drew the lines every few frames. This gave it a look similar to rotoscoping, however, I don’t think it turned out perfect and I could have maybe looked at some references beforehand to help it look more realistic.

After this, I have two more scenes planned and then I have the title page and maybe an ending page to make (I still don’t know what I will be titling this) I would also like to add some sounds and maybe some music to the story to make it more complete.