(For reference, click here & here to read prior blog posts about “Leaky Tap Animation)

I took a step back from character animation to animate a leaky tap in the bathroom. I’ve been really tired lately, so I wanted to focus on something relaxing(?).

Initially, I was going to add flickering lights, but after going through the trouble of doing so, I found them obnoxious. It has to be a looping gif, so the intervals between flickers were regular. This made it really irritating to look at for more than two seconds. I guess not every environment has to have flickering lights. In fact, I should probably use them more sparingly than I have been. 

The dripping animation itself is done straight ahead, meaning I didn’t plan out the movement with keyframes. I kind of just messed around with it until it looked roughly believable. In the end, I removed a lot of unnecessary frames left over from my straight-ahead approach. I found that the fewer frames I used, the more I had to pay attention to the movement to get the key shapes down. I want the animations in this game to be relatively snappy, so the fewer frames the better. The walk cycles, for example, are going to be no more than ten frames each, and I want to keep them at four frames a second. 

I am just now realizing that I made the leaky tap animation at six frames per second rather than four. This isn’t necessarily an issue, but it rubs me the wrong way. I am very tempted to go back and redo it, but that would require cutting out frames and to be honest, the fewer mistakes I go back to fix in this project, the better. I’d really like to let go of my perfectionism with this little project so that I don’t get bogged down by constant retouching.