Sew's Art Blog

Been in kind of a rut. All I have worth showing you is this animation test. Forgive!

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?

Sorry for the slight delay, an old friend dropped in on me suddenly and unexpectedly!

 

Just more monsters and sketches of how I want certain parts of animation to work. Nothing earth-shattering this week. Or, wait.. is this..!?

 

 
Some of the enemies I just paint from the get go, some I need to flesh out in my mind a bit more. These are the latter. Flirting with bosses. Maybe sets of generic and a special one per biome. Who knows!

 

I also did more spine tweaking for heroes but I don’t.. know exactly how to share that with anyone just yet.

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

It’s what now?

 

Since my initial plan for enemies wasn’t to use the concept art I created, I ended up having to redo art to make that concept art usable in the game itself. Now that I know that I will need to be layering it and moving things about, I’ve started painting the concept art in the appropriate layers. It’s taken a little bit of getting used to, but nothing major at all. As a matter of fact, it’s been a bit of fun. Unfortunately, the things I painted this week I all hated, and this is what I ended up hating the least.

I haven’t animated anything this week. We are in the process of switching from the png sheet animations to either using Spriter or Spine, with a leaning towards Spine. I’m putting animating these things in flash off until I know what direction we’re taking program wise. I spent the majority of my week going back and forth between the two trying to learn them and see which one is better for us. Switching will also mean that I’ll have to re-bone all of the previous running animations in the new program. It shouldn’t take much time to convert my work over, since I’ve already done most of the hard work on figuring out how the animation needs to look. It will actually end up being way better after the switch, too. Flash is kind of a nightmare for what I was doing with it. The good news though, is since everything has to be re-rigged for a new program, we might as well just paint the heroes and their outfits too. Every day’s a good day when you paint.