Learning Spriter
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The first task that was assigned to me was to learn how to properly use Spriter as a tool for animation. For previous projects I had been using both Adobe Flash as well as Adobe Photoshop for animation. Even though neither of said programs provide tools for animating exclusively frame-by-frame, that was how I had primarily operated. What this means is that I had worked by drawing a figure in one frame and then had to draw the same figure in the following frames, with the alterations necessary to portray the intended movement. Fortunately, for the workflow of this project and its schedule, Spriter would not require this of me. Instead Spriter allowed me to build a skeleton by creating bones in succession to each other. These bones were able for me to move and rotate, according to the desired pose of the character. When I was pleased with the shape and pose of the skeleton I was able to attach the various sprites to different bones: The sprite for the thigh of the character was assigned to the corresponding “thighbone” of the skeleton; the hand was assigned to the “hand bone”, and so on. When the sprites were assigned to their designated bones and put in the right z-order I had the ability to pose the character according to the desired movement of their animations. Beyond offering a more efficient way of producing animations for the characters Spriter provided me with tutorials and referred me to BrashMonkey’s where other Spriter users was able to help each other with solving the problems and overcoming the bugs they would encounter, as well as valuable instructions for how to accomplish certain tasks; like cloning a skeleton and assigning different sprites to the clone, for instance. This would become incredibly useful for me during this project. I used the tutorials on YouTube referred to by Spriter to learn how to animate the character using the skeleton. In Spriter there is a timeline going from left to right. By moving or rotating bones in the skeleton the animator can add frames on that timeline. If there are two frames on different marks in the timeline Spriter will blend the space between those two frames, and the bones from the left frame will move so that they match their position and rotation in the right frame, moving the shortest distance necessary to align.  |