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Bone/Sprite Animation Theory Help?


benlchristianson

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So I'm sitting here playing with spriter pro for the first time, using a character model I made especially for the program. I have very little animation experience though, so the best I can really make right now is a very simple idle animation.

 

I'd really love to get to the point where I'm capable of making something along the lines of the shambling skeleton animation included with the spriter pro download, because it doesn't seem to use many more techniques than the very simple bone-attached-to-sprite animation technique displayed in the tutorials found on the official brashmonkey youtube channel. But I think what I'm really lacking here is a knowledge of the theory behind sprite and bone animation. As in, how I should be going about designing assets that will be animated, what things to keep in mind, how they're animated, etc. Are there any channels, guides, or tutorials for that? Aside from just plain raw practice, obviously. I know practice is a good foundation, but it always helps to know what direction you're going in.

I guess this might be kind of a weird question to ask, but I'm definitely looking forward to your guys's responses. Thanks in advance!

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Hi benlchristianso,

 

First be sure you've watched all the Sirpter Quicktip videos: 

 

Then make sure you've watched the majority of the longer tutorials: 

 

After that, its just important to know the following:

 

1) You don't need bones at all to simply move, stretch, or rotate images around, you can just do that directly to the images.

 

2) Bones come in especially handy when you want to basically attach several images together in specific relative positions...assign them all to one bone and you just move and rotate the bone and all the images follow it as though its just one cohesive unit.

 

3) Bones are also extremely advantageous when animating any kind of life form or machine which has things like limbs, jointed moving parts etc...because you can create parent/child hierarchies... where rotating the upper arm automatically also moves the lower arm and hand etc.

 

4) SUPER IMPORTANT: Spriter lets you have completely diferent data per key frame... you can delete bones, add bones, change what images are a child of any particular bone etc per keyframe.

 

 

 

 

 

5) What I did for the skeleton's falling apart animation was simply un-parent the child bones or images from their parent bones as needed so I could animate them separately, as falling objects from that point on in the animation.

 

Cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

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