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Luke Lan Faust's Thread


LukeLanFaust

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The first character was for a project that I've put on hold. It's the first animation I had made Spriter. It took me around six hours which is a really long time. This had nothing to do with Spriter, but just my lack of experience at the time. I've managed to improve my speed since then by doing some fanart, but it could be due to the bad habits I have with over tweaking values. Even though the final animation doesn't always turn out how I liked.

 

I know how to use IK, but I find myself setting each bone individually a lot. I'm also really glad you can tweak values by scrolling over the object properties. It makes it so simple to do small adjustments.

 

I'll be putting the images for this post in spoilers to make the post a little easier to navigate if more are added.

 

My Art 


This is art I've made so far.

 

Mushroom Dash - (project discontinued)

runprev_30frames_30fps_by_lanarky-d8v7d8

 

Fanart 


Everything below is fanart for different indie games. I wanted to get better at animation and art, so I figured some fanart would help since I'm not used to using a graphics tablet or animating. I don't own any of the characters below this point, and a link to the games will be posted above each spoiler where you can play them and find more information about the developers.

 

Ultra Hat Dimension - http://eniko.itch.io/uhd

tumblr_noxxlnz0g91tlhwhdo1_r1_500.gif

 

Birdsong - http://managore.itch.io/birdsong

tumblr_noxxlnz0g91tlhwhdo2_500.gif

 

ChickenSword - http://chickensword.com/

tumblr_noxxlnz0g91tlhwhdo3_500.gif

 

Advice 


I'm still new to things, but this information might help others who are also learning about skeletal animation.

 

  • Joints 
  • ----To ensure properly aligned rotation on elbows and knees, make sure you make a perfect circle where the limb segments end. This is very noticeable on characters with outlines. The Birdsong fanart for example, there would be no need for this since the character is flat shaded.
  • ----Most limbs have to be flat shaded to look correct, with no difference in color or shade. It there's enough room to allow it, you can use transparency on joint image that lies above the other to allow the shading to blend smoothly.

 

  • Animation 
    ​
  • ----If you want to do walk cycles, check out this awesome tutorial by Ptoing. It was posted on WayofthePixel a few years ago, but he recently shared a link to his dropbox because twitter managed to mangle the gif pretty bad when I tried to show someone. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15588722/12framerunproper.gif
  • ----Enable snapping. This will prevent unnecessary keyframes from being created and allow you to easily remember key points in the animation. I hated moving keyframes before I did this, and this makes it simple to adjust their timing.

 

Other 


 

With the new API that's coming up, and the mesh deformation that's in development, I have a feeling animations are going to become easier to manage, since each limb segment won't have to be chopped up. And being able to use squash and stretch will make things even more fluid. Is there any estimate of how long after the API is done before we can use deformation in beta? Even if I couldn't save the deformation it would be awesome to test it out. :D

 

EDIT: I saw a screenshot with something called skin mode in the suggestions thread, so I'll look into that to see if that's the deformation features.

 

EDIT2: I found it, but it seems the image goes completely invisible when I double click it to change the points. Changing the image, or even after saving and loading it remains invisible. It seems I'll have to wait...

 

Thanks for making Spriter, it's very easy to get the hang of it since there's really no learning curve.

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Great looking stuff LukeLanFaust!

 

Skin mode as it currently stands is just place-holder proof of concept, with known bugs that wont be fixed, because it will be completely replaced with a better deforming feature, but that's still at least several months away.

 

Cheers.

 

-Mike at BrashMonkey

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Great looking stuff LukeLanFaust!

 

Skin mode as it currently stands is just place-holder proof of concept, with known bugs that wont be fixed, because it will be completely replaced with a better deforming feature, but that's still at least several months away.

 

Cheers.

 

-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

Although deformation is currently in a broken state, just seeing the proof of concept makes me excited for when it will be supported.

Thanks for the release estimate, v1.0 sounds like it'll be great :D

 

Until then, I'll keep trying to improve!

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just zoom out and image will be visible again in skin mode, it works great for me i dont have any big complaints about it and i hope it wont be changed drastically because its better than deformation feature in spine.

 

Hmm, I tried zooming out all the way and then tried zooming all the way in, but it doesn't seem to fix itself. Whenever it goes invisible it also removes the image from both the Z-Order and Hierarchy. It also remains hidden in, or outside of skin mode. The most I can get it to show is a green grid after I press "G" (very slow). But since it was a place holder, I assume it'll act differently on different systems.

 

I'm using a laptop with the standard "integrated Intel HD Graphics". Runs Spriter perfectly fine as long as I don't use to many IK anchors or bog it down with tons of large images.

 

From what I saw in the Spine trial, the only things I'd want from that program would be IK constraints (similar to IK anchors but movable), and mesh deformation that can optionally be weighted to bones. The new API that's coming in the next couple months will also probably take care of Game Maker Studio support. Other than that, I find that the Spine trial is extremely difficult to figure out, unlike Spriter which is pretty straight forward.

 

Thanks for mentioning the zooming thing, it was worth the try.  :)

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It works fine for me, sometimes when im zoomed in my skin mesh disappears during setting up points, i hae to zoom out a lot and image appears again, then i continue setting up points.

Im using deformation in this project:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8RnYSep1u_YZlJBNF9kd3RUazA/view?usp=sharing

You can test if its visible for you after opening.

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It still doesn't work, but I found something interesting. In your .scml file, it was using version R2, but mine is the newest R4.1. So I went and downgraded to R2, but it won't show the images even after attempting the zoom trick. Because it was designed as a place-holder, I assume it was never meant to be stable enough to work on a wide-range of systems. It's probably just a hardware issue on my end, or my laptops opengl support isn't compatible with the current method they use to draw the images.
 
Thanks again, bwwd  :)

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It works fine for me, sometimes when im zoomed in my skin mesh disappears during setting up points, i hae to zoom out a lot and image appears again, then i continue setting up points.

Im using deformation in this project:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8RnYSep1u_YZlJBNF9kd3RUazA/view?usp=sharing

You can test if its visible for you after opening.

 

Maybe send your Spriter project to bwwd and he can see if it shows up properly on his end?  Also, you should compare other aspects of your projects, like how big are the images you're using?

 

cheers.

 

-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

Whoops, didn't even think of doing that! I uploaded a .zip to my Google Drive.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3yr5b0DS_wxQm1ZLTNnbl9fcW8/view?usp=sharing

 

For me, placing a mesh into the canvas is perfectly fine. It's only if you double click it that it becomes invisible, and after that it remains invisible even if you save, close Spriter, and reopen it. It also remains hidden inside the "second view".

 

I could have just made a blank file to show the problem, but I took my Birdsong Fanart and placed a mesh at the tip of the beak. I already double clicked it, so it should already be invisible when you start Spriter. I also included some screenshots of what it looks like on my computer, since it'd probably be helpful to see what I'm talking about. The "Mesh_Placed.png" is the first screenshot, the others are after I've already double clicked the mesh.

 

I don't think it would have anything to do with image resolution since bwwd's example was also invisible on my computer, and his character images were way smaller than what have been using.

 

Thanks for taking the time to help!

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No problem with skins in your project at all, i can create new ones and i can modify them add points and all, and i can see the one you created.

I think you should change your graphics card driver to some older one, try a couple of them , that could help, it helped me with some issues before.Because if my files were invisible then it has to be something with openGL in your system.

Did you tried disable openGL in spriter menu ?

WmJSHyU.jpg

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No problem with skins in your project at all, i can create new ones and i can modify them add points and all, and i can see the one you created.

I think you should change your graphics card driver to some older one, try a couple of them , that could help, it helped me with some issues before.Because if my files were invisible then it has to be something with openGL in your system.

Did you tried disable openGL in spriter menu ?

[iMAGE]

 

Good to know it works on your end. I'll probably end up doing a clean reinstall of Spriter and see if that helps, then I'll work towards messing with drivers.

 

Thanks again, bwwd :)

 


 

EDIT:

 

I reverted my up-to-date generic Intel drivers back to the original (OEM) HP Intel drivers, but it didn't seem to change anything. I then used windows update and installed all 11 updates that were there and still got the same results. I tried disabling openGL in Spriter, but it also disables skins since it requires openGL. I also fired up Minecraft earlier to check if my openGL worked properly, and I still get around 22-30 FPS.

 

I followed this up by uninstalling Spriter, reinstalling it, deactivating my Pro licence and reentering it to make sure it was properly registered. I also tried validating the Steam version which repaired 3 corrupt files. Neither version would show the meshes though. I also ran Spriter as administrator, and set the priority to high to make sure it was getting the resources it needed,

 

On Steam, it said my computer would require "Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4 2.0 GHz equivalent or faster processor", but besides the mesh problem, it runs perfectly fine on my "Intel® Celeron® CPU 877 @ 1.40GHz" processor. If 0.60GHz wouldn't make a difference, you could probably lower the Steam's minimum requirements ;) (my CPU idles around 40-42% when running Spriter, Chrome, and Firefox)

 

Thanks for mentioning the drivers bwwd, although it seems it didn't help afterwards, it was something I wouldn't have thought of, and I feel better about having the stock OEM drivers from HP installed.

 

I wouldn't know what else to try besides that, but since it's a prototype feature and has known bugs, it's probably nothing to worry about. When v1.0 comes out with the final deformation features, I'll be sure to post any problems I have with that version.  :)

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I can honestly say that ths feature alone warrants buying new laptop or desktop pc, its really fantastic and spriter's price is a steal for what deformation feature can already do, spine costs a lot more and its deformation feature isnt really as good and you cant swap pictures when deforming like in spriter, also spriter mesh is already subdivided and in spine you have to do it yourself and add weights etc, it takes so much time.

I only wsh it would be easier to deform single mesh with 2,3,4 or more bones, i know its possible cause i did it once but its hard to do, you have to place your mesh in particular way also if i will use multiple bones on one mesh then second bone cant have as many deformation points as first bone for some reason, cant add vertical lines, so currently im avoiding using multiple bones on one mesh, its possible but not as efficient as having separate meshes..

Well i actually tried multiple bones now and it worked, but your picture needs to be in horizontal position, otherwise it wont create new segments for other bones.

HtA41CD.jpg

This is what i mean by not being able to create vertical lines , only first segment can have them cause new segments dont have left-right arrows to do it and you can create only one segment for bone  

PGxr6Yq.jpg

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