This still isn’t the blog update that you need, or that I want to be writing. I’ve gone from broken to busy to missing. In my infinite wisdom I managed to ruin almost all of my separated of groups for different categories and am scrambling to get them back where they need to be. Every piece lines up like it’s supposed to, it’s just a matter of finishing the directional break up (again), animating the idle pieces, and redrawing a couple “broken” leg pieces.
Join us next week when I get my life together and show you a finally finished animation.
I promised you finished idle animations today, but it looks like I’m a liar. I lie, sometimes. Often, really.
So I had just about finished all my completely redrawn pieces for idle animations when I realized “Wait.. I can just use some of the pieces and redraw the ones that don’t work!”. Why this didn’t dawn on me earlier, and why no one questioned my logic at any point in time is beyond me.
While I said the idle animations aren’t finished, what I meant is that the only thing that isn’t finished about them is that they don’t move yet, and manipulating the pieces for animation isn’t that difficult. So how many pieces do I have to redraw? Ten. That’s right, only ten! For South/East, it’s both feet and a hand, and for North/West it’s just the feet. Exciting, and way better than 76 extra pieces every time I make a new article of clothing.
I also have my current ‘sk-test’ button sitting there. It’s purpose is to make sure layering is working properly with different outfits. You’ll notice a few issues here and there with it. The issues come from my initial set of apathy clothing being a little lose, and as I manipulated it to hide the under-skin, sometimes parts of other sets that weren’t the same size would bleed incorrectly. This is another easy fix, it just takes a little bit of time. Once it’s finished properly now it will never be an issue again.
You’ll also notice that the bottom two animations clothing are currently just mirrored versions of the above two. This existed just for these testing purposes and is on it’s way out right now. The chest tattoo that says HAWK will no longer saw WAH after this update. Soak it in.
Goal for next week: I’ll be posting a mini update this Wednesday talking about clothing and makin’ outfits, and by Sunday we should have a few sets of fully animated junk to deal in.
(Totally wrote most of this last night and forgot to upload it entirely, heh)
Okay, completely forgetting about making the idle animations was a huge oversight on my part. I was pretty angry (new blog name: angry artist?) at myself and the situation for about a day or so. But let’s just all relax a little and look at this objectively. The ideal situation for this is to take all the pieces from our existing running animation and tweak them to be an idle animation. The benefits of this approach are many, since it means clothes will not need to be redrawn for idle animations, they’ll just magically happen and I can rest easily. But is it do-able?
The short answer appears to be no, it is not. The joints created for movement really don’t look very good stationary with subtle motions attached to them. So what does this all this mean? I’m glad you asked, because I’ve made a fairly redundant chart to help us all out!
The base animation is just what it seems like. The base nude animation, ripe for the layering of everything else over.
The Full Base Set is also straight-forward. It’s the same as the base, but for the other directions. The good part about this phase is that I only have to draw two bases and copy paste them, since the nude has no reason to need to be asymmetrical. They are each broken out into their own pieces (east head, south head, etc etc), that way each of them is kept independent from one another, even though they look the same at this point.
There is the secret ‘in-between’ step of designing these outfits that I will discuss in greater detail in the near future. For now though, the next step is to draw each outfit item 4 different time (if need be) for each direction. Some items won’t need to actually be redrawn and will just be copied over, but the majority of interesting outfit designs are asymmetrical and will need to be drawn for each direction. It’s also important to remember that this is for each item (shirt, pants, shoes, hair). This part really doesn’t take along as you might expect. I tried my best to expedite this phase by creating a generic base for each direction. The base dictates where the edge lines for each object need to meet to mesh properly with the other objects, such as upper-arm to lower-arm.
I’ve said it before, but the best part of this entire process is that once the bases are completed, they never really need to be touched or dealt with again. This is true of all bases, male/female, running/idle. So the big question now is, how far along am I in this process and how much longer until it’s finally over?
Trick question, since outfits could in theory go on forever. I don’t have a current goal for outfits before I walk away and work on another part of the game, so I figure I’ll just draw as many as can until I get tired of them. I’m actually really looking forward to lots of outfitting, working on apathy felt like doing real art again, though it was broken up quite a bit by tweaking how the base looked. Anyway, the idle animations are a lot more simple than the running (and any sane person would have done them first), and I’m about halfway done with them now, so the full set should be finished by the next blog post. Then it’s just a matter of making them ‘fits. I should also take just a second to mention women since I didn’t add them to the chart. They are basically just a remap of the base with their own set of outfits. They will require a little bit of tweaking, I’m sure, but for the most part it’s a straight forward process of swapping out the man-ish parts with more lady-like parts. (and of course dividing them into their appropriate folders based on direction and blah blah blah).
So ETA? As long as I didn’t forget about some other huge part of character map animations, this is the pre-penultimate post on the technical of the animation. The post Sunday will be about the finished idles, Wednesday I’m planning on talking about the designing of the character outfits a little, and following Sunday we should be looking at the some finished sets.
Animations here are probably the biggest part of the game for me. The other large part is going to be making the enemies and then animating those enemies, but I’m much, much less worried about them. Why? Because they don’t need to be modular like character animations do. The enemies aren’t created in such a way that the player can manipulate how they look, so if something doesn’t look right when I make it or animate it, I can just redraw that part. There are no underlying pieces that I have to get just right so they’ll work properly with all subsequent pieces layered, because those other pieces also won’t even exist. I’ll actually be quite relieved when we get to that point.
Everything has been redrawn, characters will never be allowed to be shirtless because the waist-band idea only partly worked.
Faces and some asymmetrical tweaks pending. His head is a little too big, etc etc.
I want so desperately to be out of animation town. I realized about 20 minutes ago that I completely forgot about idle animations. Completely and totally. Oh, goodness. Argh.
I now officially have a headache.
Shame Post: There will be one Wednesday, I have no idea what will be in it right now. Idle animations? The female animation is almost finished, so that, too? I don’t even. I don’t even know right now.
I clearly did not updated on Wednesday when I said I was going to. I live in tornado alley (incidentally, right below one of those three tornado graphics), and things got a little weird this past week. But let’s get right down to it.
My plan that I was so sure was going to work, actually didn’t work out the way I needed it to. The idea was to have a base layer with all the un-clothed character animations in it, and then to have a layer directly over that one with all the clothes, so the clothes would always appear on top. The result is something like this.
Obviously having EVERY piece of clothing appear above every piece of base caused this fun layering issue. So I I had to re-think my layers and ended up merging the two. This works a lot better because I can manipulate piece hierarchy between sets. For example, with the nude set, I want have the legs appear above the main body piece. But with clothes, I’d like for the body-shirt to appear above the legs. It was a simple fix with a little folder move. The result of merging the layers ended up like this.
The behind the scenes stuff was me re-figuring out how to make those buttons work for clothes and things. It’s basically the same script I wrote for changing color, I just had to edit it a little differently. It actually took me 3 tries before I got it working the way I wanted it to. The way clothes were positioned above the base was also a cause of some frustration because the pieces didn’t quite snap the way you’d expect them to. It required more tweaking, especially the joints for the knees/elbows. I think I got it worked out, though.
Since everything seemed to be working in practice it was time for me to make sure each section was arranged correctly, and then begin moving and merging the base and outfit layers for the other 3 directions. But before I did that, I wanted to make sure everything was working properly, so I didn’t have to come back and manipulate things again. I decided to try and make ApathyTeen proper.
I am again frustrated. Everything looks OK except the feet are really bothering me and I can’t seem to get them to look right. My mind began to wander a bit. This next part has less to do with the direct art process for the game, and more to do with my current state of mind and the process of me creating things in general. (You are welcome to skip it, I italicized it for easy skippin’!)
I became a little disillusioned with myself earlier this week when I was fixing up my redone portfolio and decided to put a date on each of the images I had up there. Of the 11 images I edited it down to, eight of them were done in 2010, with one from this year and one from 2011.
My first instinct was to go to my art directories from 2011, 2012, and 2013. I was surprised when I realized these directories were mostly empty. Have I really just not been making art like I used to? My ’11 and ’12 directories combined have eleven images in them. In contrast, I have 150 images from 2010 saved (and each year before that seems to average between 60-80). How is it even possible that I did so little art the past 3 years?
I have my first art for FairWeather marked as around May of 2011, though that was around a weird time in my life where I had just moved and was looking for a job and was fairly busy. I didn’t start working on this project intently until about January of 2012, and up until that point I wasn’t really able to get much art done for anything. Since Jan of ’12 though, I have 335 saved images in my GameMake directory. Some of these are still images of plans, some concept art, flash animations, some are slight edits to other images, so I’m not suggesting that these are all fully finished pieces of artwork, but these 300 plus images are just the ones I ended up saving and sharing. I felt a little better when I realized that my art production hadn’t slowed down over the past few years.
However, I kind of feel like a fake at this point. I feel like any other artist would have been done with this project by now, or at least have a lot more to show for it. Even compared to any other project I’ve ever worked on, I’m getting an alarmingly small amount of work finished. And it’s not from lack of time spent working on it, I can prove that. Looking at the numbers, I’m perplexed at how I can spend so much time and get so little done. It was when I got to this point in the animation process that I started to understand a little better.
At this point I’m frustrated with the entire design of everything, but that reminds me of what Derek Yu wrote, “stop making excuses for starting over”. I will admit that I have restarted the animation process several times, and am always extremely upset with it, but it’s not just that a shoe isn’t lining up properly. It’s that I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew on the animation end of things. I’d say “on the game as a whole”, but I don’t believe that to be true. Nothing, for the most part, about the other aspects of the game has me worried or stressed out. I want to get this done as quickly as possible, but I am seriously starting to wonder if my design and style choices for animation was holding me back.
Having said that, all that’s left to figure out is the shoes and how to get them to display properly. The framework for everything else is almost in place and pieces are easily swap-able. There are a few fringe instances. For example, I will need to add an extra piece of clothing for the pants that wasn’t necessary for the bases. It will serve as a waist line piece, fixing every pair of pants on a shirtless person looking like a pair of chaps.
It’s almost done. The skin is changer is broken in this one because of how I have the not-seeable outfits layered. But it’s really close. To give you an idea of how much time making this framework saved me, I made the entire outfit set for apathy that you see in about 20 minutes, and that includes having to adjust some of the pieces slightly so they’d line up correctly.
Work smarter, not harder.
Goal for next week: I’m kicking it into high gear to cross the map-animation finish line. Finished male & female thin running animation sets with however many outfits I have time to make. I’ll run some tests of these new graphics on the current map-tiles and we’ll see what adjustments need to be made, and then possibly move back into tile battle work.
