tombmonkey Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 Just sketches and concepts for the time being. Critics and comments are highly appreciated. Early Concepts, White Queen and Black Pawn. Black Pieces. Trying to come up with a color palette and some themes for the backgrounds. Pawns, changed proportions because I switched the game from jumping on enemies to slashing enemies and 3 head tall people with swords look kind of silly. The Bishops. The Rooks. I have 3 main body types, the plan is to make the animations using a base for each type and recicling animations between characters that share the same body type. First walk test. Regular male base. It's missing a frame when the right foot touch the ground, prob spriter crashed and I forgot to redo it, wasn't gonna reassemble the thing all over again just for that. :lol: Anyone knows a simple program to make gifs, where I can just load all the pngs and hit save gif. Doing this in photoshop is too slow to do it for showing purposes. I have only done traditional animation in the past so I'm a bit at a loss as to how to make cutout animation. Im gonna try and combine both styles and see what happens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KFII Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 Hi tombmonkey, very nice work! About converting PNGs to GIFS, do you mean a PNG animation? Also just out of curiosity, why do you want to use GIFS? I imagine it's to reduce file size, but in my little graphics tweaking experience, image quality for GIFs is very low, I may be wrong though (I prefer using PNG32 to preserve transparency.) If I had to convert a bunch of PNGs to another format, I'd use the batch process feature, I think Photoshop has that no? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombmonkey Posted June 20, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 Convert the animations to gif so I can post them here lol. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KFII Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 Haha, you can tell i'm a total noob with animation stuff :') I just did a quick search using "best PNG to GIF batch conversion, and found this open source soft which is super small and seems to work fast (I just tried it with a bunch of PNG images.) http://sourceforge.net/projects/bulkimageconver/files/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombmonkey Posted June 20, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 I dont need batch conversion, I needed a program that I can point at a folder and it will make an animated gif with the files. I managed to do it with photoshop using actions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KFII Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 Ah, great! Sorry for having misunderstood. I'll look into doing it this way as well, so thanks for the tip :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coreymill Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 If you aren't too concerned with how the image looks you could use Gifcam. It is by far the quickest and easiest way to make a gif, however it does not use individual png files and the quality may not be quite as high as the more time-consuming methods. You would have to just play the animation in Spriter and save it from there. You would have the x and y axis from Spriter in the gif, but like I said, if you are just using it to show something off quickly it's probably the easiest option. Really nice looking stuff btw, I look forward to seeing it in motion! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombmonkey Posted June 20, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 To make an animated gif using the png files rendered from spriter with photoshop in a quick way: In photoshop go to file->Scripts->Load files into Stack... and point it to the folder where your files are, it will load all the files as layers. When that finishes, in the animation timeline hit the button in the upper right corner to display the options and choose "Make frames from layers" and then just file->save for web to save the animated gif. *********************************************** This is how I'm working, as I said I havent done much cut out animation before so I don't know if this is a good process. I try to get the pose I want in spriter with whatever I have, then I draw over it and separate in pieces. Later on I do the animation with what I have, then start checking the keys and drawing more pieces where needed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HardcoreBadger Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 with the gimp u load the first image, then all the others in layers (drag n drop) and then u export to gif its the fastest way i found, before i used others techniques Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XtraTrstrL Posted June 20, 2013 Report Share Posted June 20, 2013 Pretty cool, at first glance, it brought the old Battle Chess game to mind. Very nice work so far, this looks like it could be fun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lucid Posted June 21, 2013 Report Share Posted June 21, 2013 As I said in the email, this looks fantastic. Animation is awesome. Great use of image switching/bones to get that hybrid pageflipping/modular look. The character design is great as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike at BrashMonkey Posted June 23, 2013 Report Share Posted June 23, 2013 Beautiful art tombmonkey! cheers, Mike at BrashMonkey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombmonkey Posted June 24, 2013 Author Report Share Posted June 24, 2013 Thanks a lot everyone :) I made this and various other animations, I personally consider the experiment a success. Now that I have a bit more experience with spriter I think I have come up with the kind of animation I want to achieve. My plan is using the modular animation style as a means to save time on cleanup and in betweening, but not rely on it to make entire complex animations using only a handful of images. Animations should make the pieces, not the other way around. So since I feel ready to start animating I started with the basic stuff. I plan on working with bases and develop my games and maybe spriter art packs using them, doing traditional animation I always animated the nude body anyway, so it doesn't have to be any different now. These are the bases I would like to fully develop over time. And a random sketch just because. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HardcoreBadger Posted June 24, 2013 Report Share Posted June 24, 2013 he walks like a midget but your all ur characters have charism and style Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bwwd Posted July 22, 2013 Report Share Posted July 22, 2013 you have some nice designs:) About animation, you need to add foot deformation too, its very stiff and it should bend when you walk so your character is on toes , deformation like this is not currently possible so maybe try to use 2 layers for foot, one layer is toes and other one is rest of the foot.Also entire hand is one element but its bent in elbow and wrist and looks more like real animation not cutout thanks to it being only one element. I made this running anim using cutout character too but i used deformation so it doesnt look like cutout that much, foot is only one element but deformed a bit so it looks like bent toes sometimes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RunnerPack Posted December 18, 2013 Report Share Posted December 18, 2013 Looking good, tombmonkey; both the art and the animation! You should definitely switch from GIF to APNG, though. It supports full 32-bit RGBA like PNG, often with smaller file sizes! Every major browser has had support for many years. A decent, free tool for making them is APNG Anime Maker: https://sites.google.com/site/cphktool/apng-anime-maker (If you're not using Windows, check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG#Application_support) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orville Posted January 27, 2014 Report Share Posted January 27, 2014 (edited) Extremely delightful work! Edited March 9, 2015 by RunnerPack Edited to remove spammer gibberish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigitalSoapbox Posted February 4, 2014 Report Share Posted February 4, 2014 Very cool. Can I suggest increasing the movement on the torso for a more dramatic walk cycle? It's a little subtle right now and with the character designs you're showing I'd think it would be more eye-catching and have a bit more personality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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