For this
week I have started working on the animations for the Piñata. I decided to
learn how to animate in flash with the bone tool to be able to produce
animations faster as we will need three different animations for each action of
the player character. How I thought the piñata would move proves to be perfect
to this method as well. The Piñata is made of paper hence can’t stretch or morph
much as it would break. The loss of animating with the bone tool is that you
can either get no stretch or distorted stretches as you stretch the image
itself. Therefor this technique is perfect when I don’t want to do any of that!
Starting
with, when you are going to build a skeleton for 2D images you need to have
every piece by itself. I want to be able to move the head of the Piñata without
having a plank space being left behind it in its front part and neck. So I drew
every piece as whole. Like this:
It is like
a paper doll, which is appropriate since Piñatas are paper made!
Next I had
to import my parts into flash. I had big troubles with this because my images
either lost quality or became distorted. My solution to that was to have a PSD
with all the parts in separate layers. Then I imported one layer at a time from
that PSD as a movie clip. If I did not follow this process the layers got
confused with each other and got dirty with pixels from other layers.
The next
step was simply to link all the pieces together with the bone tool to create a
piñata skeleton. When done it was only to get animating. The skeleton makes it
able to drag and move the pieces related to each other at once. It can’t be controlled
to 100% so I had to go in and rotate and move some parts individually in the
essential frames. Still it is a much faster process than moving each part
individually for each frame. You just make a new frame and move the skeleton
and adjust the parts to your liking, and the program does the rest. It is like
a motion tween but much more manipulation friendly. Here is an image of the
skeleton and how it keeps all the parts in place when moving them around.
I would say
that this method is very cheap, and it is difficult to get life into the
animation since there is a loss of squash and stretch which is one of the
twelve elements of animation. Yet, it is helpful and fast, and rather realistic
to the material as of this case.
Here is a
preview of the small piñata’s walkcycle. It needs polishing, but it is a start!
See you next week!
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ReplyDeleteGreat post about your animation process!
ReplyDeleteIt is very clear what you have done and how you did it.
It is a shame that flash does not allow you to squash and stretch because the design of the pinata looks kind of like an accordion in the middle. And to me that look makes me expect it to squash and stretch like an accordion when it moves.
But because you use separate images for every part of the body of the pinata could you not create a squash effect by moving the pictures further together and apart? Because you can obviously move the images up and down with the bone tool, then you should be able to move them forward and backwards down under and over each other to create the squash effect?
For the polishing part of the animation I think you should look at the start of the walkcycle. Right now I think it looks more like it is bucking like a horse. I think it would look smoother if you made the front part of the body take longer time in the air than it does at the moment.
That is the thoughts I had with your post. It looks really good and I look forward to see the finished product.