Pac-man On the Run

When I started to think about what to do for this project, I knew I wanted to animate something relating to retro games but I was not sure which one to go with. For my final project, I animated the Pac-man game in a new perspective. Here instead of watching the game from above, we are seeing it from an "over the shoulder" shot of pacman. All elements of the scene were modelled and animated in blender by me. The scene consists on 3 parts:

• Pac-man:

  The body was made using a sphere. The original sphere was cut in half then the resulting concave hole was filled using blender's extrude and grid fill functions. The half sphere was then duplicated and fliped 180 degrees to create the lower part of pacman's mouth. To make the eyes, I used a circle. The circle was rotated so it would look good on the top half of the sphere. I then mirrored the circle and then used blender's shrinkwrap modifer so that it meshes with the sphere. To make the eyes pop I used blender's solidify modifer to extrude the eyes and then mothened the edges. For the mouth movement I simply hand animated the first keyframe with a closed mouth and a second keyframe with an openmouth then repeated these two keyframes throughout the entire timeframe (530 frames). The body movement was done by outlining a path in the maze and using blender's follow path modifier to make pac-man follow the outlined path.

• Maze:

  This started out as a plane. The obstruction / maze pattern was made by selecting the desired vertexes and extruding them.

• The food:

  Each piece of food is a sphere. I scaled the food to be small enough to fit in pac-man's mouth then duplicated them along the paths in the maze.

Another important part of the scene are the cameras. There's a camera in front and behind pac-man. to make the cameras follow the character, I used the follow path modifier to make them move along the same path as the character. Below are the views from both the front and back cameras:

Texturing and shading

Issues faced

While the basic modelling of the scene went fairly smoothly for me, I faced quite a bit of issues while animating my scene. The first issue I faced had to do with animating pac-man's mouth. For some reason, anytime I made the closed and open mouth keyframes and then played it back, the top and bottom spheres would be clipping eachother very noticably. After a bit of research and attempting to reanimate it, I realized that the issue was that the origin point was not at the middle of the goemetry. I then used "Object > Set origin > Origin to geometry" to fix it.

The second issue I encountered was getting pac-man to move along a path withouth distorting or completely ignoring the turns.

To fix this I found out theat I had to use "Alt+G" (to reset the object's location values) and then use "Ctl + A > apply all transforms". After those fixes were apply the pacman was able to move through the maze without distortion.

Even though I was able to get the chracter moving along the path, I was unable to figure out how to animate pac-man to make the sharper turns that the path outlines.

The last issue I had was with the disapearance of the food. To make the food disapear after Pac-man eats it, I initially thought that I could use a hidden tube to hide the polygon when pac-man passes it but because of the turns in the path, the food wouldn't stay hidden. To fix this, decided to manually adjust these in the animation frames.

Conclusion

A lot of ups and downs were encountered while learning how to use blender and make this project. However most of those lows were fixed through experimentation and research The resulting video is a light-hearted animation which showcases Pac-man in a new way. The final video was edited in premiere pro using renders from 3 different blender cameras and sound effects from "Gaming Sound FX" on youtube.

Thank you for reading my report, below is my resulting video. You can view complete videos from the two camera's POV in the videos file.