Patreon Peeks 28: Animating Short Hike Characters (Patreon)

Hello! This week saw the release of a new What I Love video about A Short Hike! There are several points in the video where my conversation with the game's composer, Mark Sparling, is portrayed by two "in-game" characters I animated. Mark's is the artist raccoon, as per his suggestion, and mine is a custom goat character that looks like they came from my other What I Love videos. You can see for yourself here: https://youtu.be/PCtQFf6us0c

I wanted to share how these got animated! I'm afraid I'm not a well-versed pixel artist: these were instead hand-drawn animations that got pixellated down to low resolution, similarly to how A Short Hike is a 3D environment that gets pixellated to low resolution. I start by drawing the characters using the Grease Pencil tool in Blender:

Blender allows for multiple layers of vector shapes, and you can parent those shapes to objects or bones, so tilting a character's head or bobbing their body with walking was easy. While I hand-animated Mark's mouth, for my character's mouth I parented the hand-drawn mouth to an object that would rotate/bob up and down to the actual audio of me reading the script. I learned the audio can be baked into animation curves!

For one scene, I had Mark looking through a tower viewer, similar to a few points in the game. For this scene I did one thing that excites me most about Blender: mixing 3D with 2D animation. I created a 3D model with flat colors to match the in-game tower viewer, and rotated that a bit as the scene progresses. Then I created 2D keyframes to match Mark's arms and head to the 3D animation. The two animations aren't driving each other, it's all done by hand. But it certainly is helpful that you can decrease the "framerate" of animations in Blender using an algorithm.

Once the animation was completed, the final step was importing it into After Effects, placing it in a scene, and pixellating it. The scenes also started as hand-drawn environments, like this one:

(The background island, the sand, and the water are all different layers that I can move separately to achieve parallax.)

And then every layer gets a pixellating effect known as Mosaic in After Effects. It can average colors into any number of rectangular sections, so if you divide things horizontally and vertically by the video's size ratio—in this case 16:9—it looks like square pixels. There's also an option to avoid anti-aliasing as much as possible, which looks more like A Short Hike's visual style.

So, it's not exactly pixel art... it's pixellated art! But I'm glad to have taken the extra time to add it in. Not only did it create the feeling of Mark and I going on a journey, dare I say a hike through this topic, but it also highlighted that I've made a friend through this production. :)