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!
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.