Slow week! Or lazy week. Or preoccupied with other things week! But fear not.
Flash would not let me export my base images at a higher resolution, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. After a few hours of messing with it though, I stopped caring. I realized I was going to be redrawing the individual pieces anyway, so it didn’t matter much what it looked like. This is more than just proof-of-concept though. These are the final bones and file I intend to use for these animations. The art will swap, the bones will tweak, but we’ll be on the same file at least (meaning everything inside the file is extremely organized so I don’t lose my mind).
Right now he’s got kind of stomp which I’m working on dampening. I really dislike this animation. Every piece seems a little off, its shape and the way it’s drawn just don’t feel right. Yet, strangely enough, when it’s all together and moving it comes across as a lot better than I feel it actually is.
This has not been a great week for art. That awesome feeling I had last Sunday sure did end quickly. My assumption that the way I was animating the heroes was what was making it look awful may have been a little misplaced, and it may just be me that’s messing this up. I resigned around Wednesday that I just need a break from the animation for a bit to help wrap my head around it better and decided to try drawing some other things for the project, all of which were a frustrating flop. If I was smarter I would have realized it was useless early on and not pushed myself into the super frustrated corner I am in now. But I didn’t.
I spent the free-time I had yesterday night and this morning/afternoon revisiting animation with Spine again but continue to be frustrated with it. I love the program, I am sure that getting a license for it is the correct direction to go, I am just having one hell of a time proving that to myself with a finished product. Getting an animation out is my top priority right now, so why is this so hard for me?
I need a moment to decompress.
I spent the week kind of doing the wrong thing. While finishing up the art for the animations and animating them, I for some reason was using my old animations as a per-frame model for my new animation. Why would I even. This is the old sheet:
I guess in my head everything would be faster if I based every pose of an existing set I already made. And while that’s kind of true, a 1:1 conversion looks mostly dreadful. I wasn’t playing to the strength of the new bone system, which has mostly been remedied since. If we don’t have Spine purchased by next week, I’ll fraps up a gif to show my progress on this. I still have battle animations to animate which I’m expecting by mid-week and then I’ll make the final decision, though it’s basically a sure thing at this point.
Other than the one base outfit for the male, I won’t be spending any more of my time right now on the hero animations. I’ll be working my way to getting 2 enemies (at least) finished up animation wise, and then heading to UserInterface town. Everything is going pretty good (and quick!) for the first time in a long time, it almost feels like the old days. Kinda.
It’s looking like Spine works for everything we need it to work for, and Hawk imported their test project with none difficulty. I took the time to learn it’s hot-keys and some of the less straight-forward things it does to help make a game plan for animations. The changing of outfits was the things I was most concerned with, but I am pretty sure it’s doable. I am not entirely sure what all can be done on the programming end of it, or if everything we can do mix & match wise has to be clearly visible in each combination in Spine. But just because I spent so much time in Spine doesn’t mean I forgot about swamp week! No, more importantly, how do we send swamp week off in a manner most deserving of the mighty marsh lands and our incredible journey through it?
please help me
A rough week of being ill and sleeping randomly for 6 hour chunks of time, only to be awake for 2 before doing it again is not particularly productive, as you can see. So this is your neglectful dad telling you he’ll make it up to you and take you someplace nice just as soon as he can. (this week, though)