Transformation/Mutation tutorial!

[SharpWind 228]

How to mutate your character?

There are multiple ways of making a character/block/item/object transform state in your animation. In this post (as well as in the video) i'm going to explain a few:

First method - Quick moves!

You can do nearly anything if the moves are fast; the viewer wont have the time to notice the changes and the transformation will look legit (lol).
You could help yourself out with particles or textures to make it look even better:

- Animate something with a fast motion on the place where you wanna transform your character
- Import your transformed character
- Copy paste the frames, so both characters are doing the same thing (if it doesnt work, export the frames and import them onto the other character)
- At the transformation point, make one visible and the other invisible
- Delete the excess keyframes (the invisible ones)

Second method - Energy blast!

Now's your chance to abuse the bloom feature in MI. An energy blast is so bright and intense, it hides any changes you make! You can do anything while remaining perfectly safe under the cloak of the blinding energy burst!

- Animate the character shaking/losing their mind or simply showing any signs that something isnt "well"
- Add some particle effects, make them glow (preferrably make your own and animate them - those look sick)
- Animate a camera shake (optional) and the bloom coming up with a strong ease in transition
- At the brightest point, make the mutation visible and the original invisible
- Fade down the bloom and stop the particles

Third method - The creepy crawler!

You can keep the transformation relatively slow! Have each bodypart poke out of the body with a strike of violence. The character's arms/legs would rotate, position and scale to adjust to the new bodyparts and the camera position and the character motion speed would hide the flaws once again

- Animate your character doing stuff, have the mutation be positioned inside of him, scaled down to be very tiny
- Make parts of the mutation start bursting out of the character (you can add particle effects to make it look gory and nice)
- Adjust the chatacter's arms/legs to fit the position of arms/legs of the mutation and slowly fade them, making it look like they turned into the new bodyparts
- Once you can no longer see the character, simply make him invisible

Fouth method - The even creepier crawler!

Transformation doesnt need to be shown at all. Or at least not in action. If you really want to build anticipation, you can have the transformation take place in several shots! Each shot revealing more detail and getting closer to the final mutation.

- Have your character be completely normal
- Change the shot, show us something else
- Back to the character, he should now have a more deformed skin, making it look like he's transforming into the desired mutation (you need 2 characters with seperate skins for that)
- The shot changes again, next time the character is shown, the mutation is even worse, now parts of the body are different as well, a few extra added
- The shot changes once more and the last time we see the character, it's now taking form of the final mutation.

 

I've made a video on the topic as well, touching 3 out of 4 listed topics in this topic. Enjoy!

Spoiler

 

Stay Sharp!

[Fray 711]

FIRST!!! (no one cares lol)

Lol thanks for this!!!

[Cryptic Runner 2.3k]

stay sharp? my hat isn't planted in my head, and i'm not lancer...