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.
The comment was made that my old animations looked better than my new animations. After a little searching of my soul, I found this to be an accurate assessment of my current work. I needed to compare and figure out why this was. I decided to do a 1:1 import from the old Flash files into Spine to help me figure out where I was going wrong.
stepped
interpolated
The 1:1 has a few errors in terms of how it translated into Spine because I wasn’t using bones proper in Flash. I would just remove images or make them invisible when they weren’t ‘in use’, but with real bones, they always need to exist so you’re getting a weird translation from frame X to frame Y. It’s even more pronounced here because the hand is actually being mirrored, and it’s doing it gradually frame-to-frame. So instead of being normal one frame and backwards the next, it’s normal, and then halfway in-between, and then flipped, and halfway again. These are easily fixable issues though, and I’ve already corrected them.
Th big differences are that I was not afraid to squash, stretch and skew when I was using Flash. For some reason though, since I’ve moved to Spine I haven’t done any scaling of the images at all, and I don’t know why. It’s why the old animation looks so stiff. Because.. it is!
So now I’m in the process of importing all the files for the north animation into Spine and cleaning it up. This one is a little harder because I didn’t have these images on hand already like I did for the south animation (I had used it as reference when building the new set). So I’m still ripping and mapping the bones. From there it’s just a matter of painting it and calling it good. It’s ridiculous to think I wasted so much time rebuilding the animations for.. absolutely no reason. I want to say “at least I learned a lot!” but I’m not entirely sure I did this time. Old dogs.
Actually, for the amount of time I’ve put into this project, it’s crazy how much of it feels wasted and how little I have to show for it. I’m uh, sorry, about that. I guess time doesn’t equal results, always.
