Suit Em’ up week 3 – Animation stuff
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Hello! This week I’ve focused on animation for our standard enemy’s. I think they turned out pretty good. There is still lots of details missing on these guys, but for pre-alpha and alpha it will do. I’ve used Illustrator for drawing these characters (the same way as I drew Barney). The reason for using Illustrator is because of how I built our characters I can easy change the proportion, shape, color etc. of each part of the character which makes it easy to modify. So after the basic character is created I can change every individual part exactly the way I want and by duplicating the layers I can do small variations that later will create an animation. Another reason for using Illustrator is that you can save the work in every resolution you want as Illustrator works with vector graphics. Right now our game is in 1280×720 but if we want to go with higher resolution it requires minimal work from the graphic artists on the characters of our game, which is nice!
To create the animation itself I used Photoshop cs6. As Illustrator allows you to export your files as PSD-files (Photoshop files) I could open my work in Photoshop with all my work and all layers as I left them ( only converted in to pixel-graphics instead of vector graphics as I exported them that way) and from there I created an frame-animation in Photoshop choosing which layers to show in each frame of the animation. To check if the animation look good I loop the frames. How the loop should behave in the code when it’s implanted depends on how the animations frames themselves are done. Right now I have two different types of animation. My green enemy for example is a loop animation, after the last frame the animation starts over from the first frame. My pink enemy is the opposite of a loop animation, after the last frame the animation starts to play backwards, and when it reaches the first frame again it plays normal again creating a pendulum animation (I don’t know if this is what you call them, but i think it makes sense calling them that, lol) Until now, making a sprite-sheet have been a pain to do. I did save each frame as a separate PNG-file, then reopened them in Photoshop, placed them next to each other in a new Photoshop file, saved the new file and reopened that as well and then scale the new sprite-sheet to fit the game and then save it for the last time. then I had to manually pick out the coordinates for each frame for the programmers so the animation still looks good and doesn’t jump all around. Yesterday Simon showed me a free program making it much easier to convert a frame-animation to finished sprite-sheet with an automatic text document holding the coordinates of each frame. I haven’t tried it for any of our animations yet but it was really easy when i tried it out. This is gonna save me so much time. I’m gonna be at least twice as effective. wo-ho! Heidoh! -Ludwig Lindstål  |
