In a constant state of ‘behind-and-almost-done‘. I ran into some neat issues. Sai, where I do all of my drawing/painting has a hard layer limit of 256 which I was unaware of consciously. So instead of having all of my images for all animations in one big file, I had to break it up into a new .psd for each direction. It’s really way better to do things this way, I just.. wasn’t expecting the extra time sink.
Aside from tweaking that outfit to make him look less frumpy (trust me, we’ve come a long way in that department) my to-do list is very tiny now, but the part I’m on is killing me.
- Redesign out Spine is dealing with Feet (hard/hate/arggghhh!)
- Paint North Outfit (easy)
- Mirror Bases for East/West (prob easy??)
- Draw/paint East/West outfit (easy)
And that’s like, it. One stupid hurdle.
I also got frustrated and timed myself to see how long it would take to break apart one of my old concept sketches.
Took almost exactly one hour to break it apart and roughly clean it, and.. this terrible test animation took like 10 minutes. Needs work. Proof-of-whatever, though, I guess?
I promised myself I’d have map animations totally finished by this weekend. I.. promise myself a lot of things.
Recolored the base animation. It was a little intense, but we all knew that. I drew painted a lot of the outfit pieces too to make them look a little more grounded. I added in all the proper bones and layout for face and hair and adjusted them accordingly. I started on trying to make this character look more like Codename: Apathy Teen. It’s pretty important to me to be able to transfer the character how I imagined him into motion. It’s also super weird when to watch it come together.
Hair needs to be tweaked more. Color and outline are bothering me a bit. Things lacking are properly adding the painting to the North set. I add a clipping layer over the entire folder set of pieces and then get a rough idea of lighting and slight coloring. It’ll all be adjusted to match up with it’s brother piece, as shown.
Animating these pieces is almost done too, just some arm tweaking and then general edits. I have some foot/shoe issues that have been cropping up with both sets and I am in full on debate mode on how to deal with them.
I’m down to just a couple thing on my to-do list. Adding the proper painting for north, adding the proper painting for the outfits (finished the bone layout for it today), and then figuring out the foot issues/arm issues. From there the only step left is messing with map idle animations and the mirror versions. I desperately want to get this done before Christmas, and should be able to manage that.
Had my first bout of crashes with Spine late this week. Nothing major, and while I could consistently recreate the error, I’m not sure how to explain it other than “I set these settings to X and then tried to do one very specific action”. You can see why Hawk likes me so much, I’m a great bug-finder-man!
This week saw a lot of converting. I turned all the old animation images into new ones and then tweaked the bones accordingly based on the new image sizes. I also broke some bones apart and converted them into two bones, namely the torso and hip. That alteration could have gone a lot smoother. The face as a whole is also it’s own bone, and will probably need to be broken down even further in the future. Even more important was the setting up and testing of the outfits. Every bone started with one attachment each*, the naked base you’ve been seeing. Adding clothes and outfit items is as simple as having a second attachment for that bone that I can toggle on and off. Wherever it is located on the bone dictates where it will be for the entire animation (relative), so it moves perfectly with the existing animation. I thought I was going to have an issue with clothing items getting out of alignment, but I get to dictate where each individual article of clothing is relative to the bone, so everything can be fine-tuned. The only thing I haven’t tested/messed with is clothes that will be need to be altered during the animation itself (like a scarf flapping). I’m sure it’s doable easily, just haven’t given it any thought yet (odd are though they might require their own special bone for animations like that). But enough talk.
I spent today redrawing and reorganizing my folders for the animation so that it will be easily to actually flip, and then paint both of them. The process of getting the files into Spine quickly is greatly increased by having every image already flat (lines+color as one layer) because I can use photoshop to export all my existing layers as pngs. But for editing and altering the art itself everything needs to be separated. I made some mistakes when redrawing these, in that I accidentally saved my file after I had flattened the layers and didn’t realize it in time enough to undo my mistake.
Anyway, this means all that is left for the downward animations are painting them and dressing them properly (and of course always slightly tweaking the animations to look better). Still in the process of redrawing and breaking apart the North facing set. It looked pretty rough to begin with and I’ve always kind of hated it. I am hoping to have it completely finished and ready sometime tomorrow. Then all that’s left is dressings. Such wow!
((I give my bros some shit sometimes, but everyone has been fairly supportive of my taking 8,000 hours to learn animation and not want to do it super improperly, so thanks. When I burn through everything that isn’t animation in a month you will miss the days when it looked like I was the farthest one behind <3))
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.
