Watermelons
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))
