Procedural Motion: "Hey, Listen!"

Press the mouse button anywhere on the sketch to call the fairy to your cursor.

Anyone who's familiar with the Legend of Zelda series knows about Navi: the cute, albeit annoying little fairy most Zelda fans love to hate. As we practiced with simple animation and randomly bouncing balls, the idea popped into my head to make a recreation of Navi flying around in Processing.

Most of the motion comes from Navi herself in this piece, as shown in my Work in Progress post. However, I felt that the piece was entirely incomplete without something extra, so I decided to add in a Link of my own creation, whose eyes would follow the fairy's movements.

Kind of creepy without pupils, eh? Yeah... sorry you had to see that.

I decided to take a bit of a different route when designing my take on Link to be used in the sketch. Instead of creating the shapes in Processing, I took to the photo editing program GIMP to design the character. The reason I chose to do this is so I'd have a bit more leeway in options for shapes I could use, and could really tweak things to be just the way I like. Not only that, but I absolutely needed transparency in the eyes, so I could layer behind them a canvas of white with dark gray pupils on top, with the ability to move around with the fairy. I'm not entirely great with photo editing/creation software, so it kind of ate up an entire day for me, but it was well worth it to get the results I ended up with!

As a bit of a side note, if there are any fellow Zelda fans reading my blog: despite Navi not appearing in any games featuring "Toon" Link, I chose to use his design due to the character's big, expressive eyes I could work with. Easier to see the movement of the pupils that way, I think!

Overall, this sketch was a lot of trial and error, but I do think that (at my skill level as a beginner) I was able to create something I'm quite fond of. As I learn more about the program, we'll see what future projects will hold.

♪ Paige