Sew's Art Blog

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.

I think I echo this sentiment quite well, “Please enjoy watching this blog document my drift towards going further and further off the schedule”. We are zealous, but he makes less promises than I do. Directly, at least.

All these gifs are displaying at 24 frames per second and.. Seem laggy to me? Things are a bit quicker and smoother in Spine, and I’m sure if I uploaded them as a video things would be better. These are sufficient for the purposes of this blog right now though, so!

     

There was no request for a walking animation but I did it anyway and I don’t really know why? But they exist now, I guess!

  

There is currently no foot-swapping going on for the north set. The lack of the foot swap makes the animations for this set look really goofy and off. Posted here for documentation purposes only, I guess! And to that end, there is no hand swapping going on on either one of them, which is something I thought I’d have done this week but got distracted when I decided to just pop my head into outfit town for a second..

Outfits are a little bit more tricky than I had initially thought. Not in terms of drawing them, though. With the bone animation every skin image that you’re seeing is attached to one of the bones. Spine has a built in skinning system, so I can swap one of those pieces with an article of clothing. However, swapping means that skin is no longer visible, so a low cut shirt or pair of shorts would be floating like a ghost was wearing them. So my plan is very similar to what I was doing back in our flash days. We’ll have a new set of bones that rest on top of the other bones for clothes. So the BodyBone and ShirtBone would be the same and move the same way, and when I want to see a different kind of shirt I will just swap it on. This.. works in theory, at least. I am in the process of setting it up in practice. And I really need to talk to Ron Gilbert about it.

click for bigger

There has also been a lot of debate (in my mind) about how to paint the character art. My initial plan was for some heavy lighting that looks super rad, but it would require me to do more than just flip the skin art for East/West (me being lazy). It would require more care on the part of map objects and the like as well to keep everything consistent. Having said that, I am not completely decided that I am not going this route, as a strong sense of lighting can really help to ground the world. Public debate ensues.

Here is a slightly more detailed version of what the road-map actually is.

Monsters are a case-to-case basis that I’ll talk about in greater detail once I have the appropriate information to be sharing (meaning, better experience with it).

Spine is also doing a second kickstarter with super awesome features I can’t wait for. Check it out if you need awesome stuff in your life. (and be happy that we saved $150 bones buying it when we did!)

Last weekend we entered Asylum Jam 2013! Someday, someone will play it. By the time I realized I forgot to update the blog it was the middle of the week and I couldn’t even recall what I did in detail enough to write about. Sorry!

Busy tweaking the art for the different movements with the north/west animations. Currently the ankles are too long on the foot layer, upper legs aren’t rounded enough and poke out funny. And of course, it still needs the alternate hands/feet for that illusion of life. Little too tired to keep working on this tonight, but it should be done fairly early tomorrow and I’ll update with some actual animation then.

After that, the bases are more or less finished. I’ll be painting them to help them fit in their world properly, and then drawing the first outfit and putting that through it’s paces. This part was the hardest part of the entire hero animation process. Here’s a rough current road-map.

Projecting Running/Idle for Mon/Tues, first outfit for Wed/Thurs, and battle animations for Fri/Sat. Everything seems just so simple now.

This definitely took longer than I thought it would from the get go. I spent more time tweaking the size of the images for use with the bones than anything else. Animation is also a lot easier with an isometric guide layer. Glad someone told me*!

Gif is a little slow. Wrong hand, no switched feet yet, and it’s not painted yet. But I am so excited about all of this right now. Tweaking my way through a battle animation right now.

*no one told me :- (

I had an epiphany mid-week on how to do these bone animations. It’s hard to explain completely, but the gist of it is that I am used to doing stepped animations, not interpolated animations, and seeing each piece interpolate to the next really messed with my brain and the entire process I had cooked up. So I changed my set-up mode to be stepped, and then interpolated it after the fact. Now that I have complete confidence in my program, my only obstacle is getting the art to look like I want it to in motion.

This means a Spine license purchase is a-go! Everyone rejoice as the company takes it’s first hit of investment juice and our first hit to funds to the tune of -100$. Go us! (speaking of which, I’ll be uploading some gifs of the animation when I purchase the license later this week)