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)
This has not been a great week for art. That awesome feeling I had last Sunday sure did end quickly. My assumption that the way I was animating the heroes was what was making it look awful may have been a little misplaced, and it may just be me that’s messing this up. I resigned around Wednesday that I just need a break from the animation for a bit to help wrap my head around it better and decided to try drawing some other things for the project, all of which were a frustrating flop. If I was smarter I would have realized it was useless early on and not pushed myself into the super frustrated corner I am in now. But I didn’t.
I spent the free-time I had yesterday night and this morning/afternoon revisiting animation with Spine again but continue to be frustrated with it. I love the program, I am sure that getting a license for it is the correct direction to go, I am just having one hell of a time proving that to myself with a finished product. Getting an animation out is my top priority right now, so why is this so hard for me?
I need a moment to decompress.
I spent the week kind of doing the wrong thing. While finishing up the art for the animations and animating them, I for some reason was using my old animations as a per-frame model for my new animation. Why would I even. This is the old sheet:
I guess in my head everything would be faster if I based every pose of an existing set I already made. And while that’s kind of true, a 1:1 conversion looks mostly dreadful. I wasn’t playing to the strength of the new bone system, which has mostly been remedied since. If we don’t have Spine purchased by next week, I’ll fraps up a gif to show my progress on this. I still have battle animations to animate which I’m expecting by mid-week and then I’ll make the final decision, though it’s basically a sure thing at this point.
Other than the one base outfit for the male, I won’t be spending any more of my time right now on the hero animations. I’ll be working my way to getting 2 enemies (at least) finished up animation wise, and then heading to UserInterface town. Everything is going pretty good (and quick!) for the first time in a long time, it almost feels like the old days. Kinda.
Wasn’t around last week because of Animefest in Dallas. Good times, you should have been there! Maybe you were, even.
Doing the final stress tests in Spine to make sure everything is working well. All the bones are in place and named accordingly. They are simple to adjust down the road if we ever need to, which I’m absolutely in love with. My main issue now is coming from the art itself. Leh gasp!
These are my roughs for testing purposes. They are a little much in terms of size (the image above is actually reduced by 25%), so when I paint the real thing they will probably be reduced by at least 50% (which still leaves them at about eight times larger than we’ll ever need them to be). Drawing them is fine, it’s trying to figure out what happens behind pieces and how much of them I need to draw that is hurting my brain for no reason. That, and when to swap an image for a different one. It’s just about all situated.
I’ve been thinking about what this means for outfits. The old flash style more or less required one piece of clothing that was used for both idle and running animation. I’m in the mind set now of a different set of art for idle/running. That might change once everything is in place and it might end up being OK to go back to that old style. I won’t be able to say with certainty until the running animation is completed if those pieces will be usable for idle or not. I’m also really interested in how much can be reused for attacks and battle animations. It’s like I’m playing some weird modular video game where more pieces means slightly more work.
A friend recommended a good book that’s helped make me more accepting of ‘the way things currently are’ in regards to real job/hobby job. Thanks, friend! And book!