After all theeese yeaaars.
Slow week, not much to say, be semi-sad with me.
Still have a ton of meshwork to do on the north set(s) after some general art fixes for things that used to work but don’t now (feet shape, upper arm shape, etc). Then it’s a matter of making a real outfit. Hopefully by the end of the week the runtimes we use will be updated and I can do some actual in-game testing of this sooner rather than later.
The terrible task of Meshing and Skinning. Skinning, different than Skins. Skins are what let me swap between male and female with just a click, while Skinning allows me to set vertex weights to different bones than the ones they are attached to. First I have to figure out where my vertices need to go.
This part isn’t really very straight forward. It all makes sense to me, but getting it to work a practical way that is useful takes some time and tweaking. I have used to have to manually edit my vertexes during an animation to make up for gaps in the art. This is super common on hard joints like the elbows and knees. With Skinning set up properly though, the vertices fix themselves automatically. I had to mess with it a lot to figure it out and get it to work how we need it to since there is no documentation on it right now. My first real task we trying to recreate all of our old animations as best I could.
They all need little tweaks here n’ there. The exciting part for me is that I did all of those animations in one day. The majority of my week was spent Meshing and Skinning. I even made a few walking animations that I know we don’t need. The only important rough that is lacking is an idle animation. That is on me not really know what to do with it, though..
I also made some other important decisions!
It’s all pretty well explained there in my letter to Hawk, but doing this will save another large chunk of time, as I won’t have to recreate an entire skeleton and animation for soul purpose of just having clothes mirror properly. Rejoice!
I’m having to be very careful and very organized when it comes to costuming so I don’t confuse myself and makes thing needlessly convoluted. This is a part that isn’t a big deal to anyone but me, probably. Everything is very organized, it’s just that there is so much of it, it can seem like clutter.
The slots will never change (though I may need to add a few more depending). The attachments are what I really have to make sure stay in check. They need a proper naming convention, probably just GENDER_SETNAME-ITEM, like FEMALE_SPORTY-LEFT_UPPER_ARM, or something I can glance at easily. Luckily, each set (South/East) are hot-keyed so I can toggle the entire thing on or off when I need to easily. Thankyouspine.
Before I can sign off on it though I need to run a quick test just to make sure my outfit theory is good..
While my cohorts won’t admit it (at least not to my face (but probably more as a tool to keep me moving)), the way the base animation looked needed some love. Both structure-wise and painting-wise. Since I was faced with the task of basically redoing my Spine project, I figured now was the perfect time to kill some birds.
The first step was to adjust my default standing position. The old one was just the first frame of the only animation that existed at the time, but it’s kind of a bitch to work with. A much better idea would be to draw the character standing a little more normally. So let’s do that real quick!
What’s this?! Surprise, women! And surprise, all pieces completely redrawn and proportioned better! Ho-Ho. They are also drawn a lot larger than the old version. Yeah, I know, even my old version was way bigger than we’re putting them in game. I think Hawk said he was resizing the old one by around 80%. Yikes. So why would I take the time and trouble to make full version even larger? It’s just easier to work with, get off my back old man. Here’s the back view, ’cause I’m generous.
Okay, so now what? After some quick alignment tests in Spine to make sure I drew all the pieces the right sizes to prevent overlapping, it’s time to do some paintin’. Oh boy, my favorite. Oh, and actually drawing the hands and feet. Lazy, lazy.
Now everything looks good again! Excite! From here, I do a heavy amount of work in Spine. I convert several of the body pieces into meshes to help remove gaps in the animation. I’ve also gone ahead and properly set up the skins in spine, so switching from male to female during any of the animations is as easy as clickin’ a button. After all the meshes are made, it’s time to recreate all the animations again. This is probably the easiest and hardest part of this process.
Keep in mind these are nowhere near finished animations. I did this animations super fast just to kind of get a feel that I was on the right track and that my meshes were working properly. The left upper arm still need some tweaking, just a little too bulky at the top and I can’t mesh that away.
I have a few things left to do here that I was hoping I’d have enough time to finish before this blog went up, but I guess I don’t. I still have to paint the North set and mesh it, then do the the animations proper again. None of these are the daunting task that I thought redrawing everything was though, so I’m very pleased with the speed and quality I managed to do this at.
I did in less than a week what took me more than a year to do the first time. I’ll just let that sink in.
I’ve put aside UI work for a bit until Hawk is fully ready prepared to work on it with me. It seemed like better choice to work on it at the same time than to prepare a bunch of stuff and then have to go back and edit it all. It’s also hard to work on certain parts of the UI when we aren’t completely sure what going to be getting cut or heavily altered. Instead I jumped back into Spine, where I belong.
So I had forgotten to properly skin my animations in Spine. I thought I did, but I totally set it up wrong. I went back through and tried to adjust my existing animations with skins properly, but spin kept crashing on me because it hates meshes being added to a skin slot. Or.. hates them being added after the fact. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the bug exactly, but submitted what I do know about it either way. Using the skin feature also requires me to slightly re-evaluate the clutter in spine in regards to attachments. I have it down in theory and have made some example projects. Bone->Attachment->SkinPlaceHolder->[name.png], which is pretty much the structure on how it is now. I can’t use skins for the clothes though since I can only view one skin at a time. I’m thinking of going with Male/Female skins, but yet at the same time, it might be more worth it to do male/female as separate projects. In that, I could have all of a certain outfit as a skin. That approach loses me the ability to ‘easily’ see mixing and matching of clothing pieces though. The way it is now, I have to turn on the individual pieces myself to view an outfit.. decisions.
Other than messing with that, I haven’t really done a whole lot this week. Been fairly stressed about some things and just. Wanting to take the rest of the weekend easy so I don’t blow another gasket.
