Animating San

The animation of San.

In the last blog post we talked about how San was redesigned.
In this one we are picking up the new design and showing how animations evolved.

On the Left, the new San running animation. On the Right, the old one.

As you can see, the new San is much more upbeat, happy and overall more energetic. With the old design, even if we wanted to give him more energy it would be harder to show.

Also, we now have multiple versions of the same animation. So whenever you are running, we will play a slightly different version making everything look way more natural.

What about walking? I hate running around everywhere, can't we just... walk?

Yeap, sure you can,"San".

On the Left, the new San walking animation. On the Right, the old one.

Again, when redesigning, we took the opportunity to think about the look and feel of the character.
Also, just look at that belly on the old version. What is THAT? Is that a beer belly? We will never know.

We kept the same pipeline, and just like before, animations are being done in Esoteric's Spine software. Thank you, Esoteric! The team loves you and if you can read this, send us extra free stuff.

San's bones, instead of white, are colored. A major problem for hospital's X-ray machines.

Originally, animations were done by Francisco, but as the project grew we needed a dedicated animator to join the team. We printed a world map and hung in on the wall. Then we grabbed a dart and threw it with our eyes closed...
Anyway, Barna Nemes came all the way from Hungary and he took the mantle of rigging and animating San with amazing results.

You can follow Barna on Instagram here.
You can buy maps to print here.
Professional darts here.

Currently San has MANY more animations. Those include things like "idle", "throwing spear", "jumping", "falling" etc. We also have more characters with their own rigs, animations and so on.

Out of Line is getting bigger and bigger by the day and it is wonderful to finally see this project coming to fruition.

See you guys next time!
Que te pasa, calabasa?