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Why can't I apply a negative scale on both X and Y?


homshabom

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I'm sorry but this is just ridiculous... Why in the world would you not allow both a negative x-scale and a negative y-scale? When you attempt to do this, Spriter automatically flips them both back to positive and applies a 180º rotation. THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING.

If you want to see what I mean, start a new spriter project. use any image that is not symmetrical to more easily see what is happening.

Add the same image twice, flip the second one of them horizontally (-1.00000 x-scale). Now you have the same image twice with one of them being a mirror image of the other.

Now, somewhere down the timeline, key all and make them both -1.00000 y-scale. So what you would expect to see when you play the animation is 2 images, one a mirror of the other, flip vertically. But click the play button and see what actually happens.

Instead of the 2nd one flipping vertically like the 1st one, you see it flip horizontally and rotate 180º, the frames between the keys are very different and demonstrate how negative scaling in both directions IS NOT THE SAME as just rotating 180º.

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Hi homshabom.

I see the cause for your frustration.

The reason Spriter does this is based on the reality of image manipulation, however, clearly this decision has very disasterous results in the rare event you actually want a tweened animation of both flippings taking place.

From an image stand point, the resulting images is identical when rotating 180 or flipping both horizontally and vertically, but this won't help you if you want that animated.

Am I assuming correctly you want the change in x and y dimension tweened in the animation so that the fact it switches to a 180 degree rotation breaks your animation?

Thanks.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

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OK. This should definitely be considered a bug. Our apologies for the inconvenience. Believe it or not you're the first person to catch this bug. It goes to show how even issues with basic functionality can go unfixed for literally years if no one ever discovers or reports the issue.  I'll discuss the matter with Edgar as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I think there is a work-around (which of course should not be necessary but currently is) which is not too wasteful of time and resources, if you want to give it a try.

Spriter only hijacks and alters the flipping and turns it into a rotation if both the x and y scale at the same time are negative numbers.  So the trick is to figure out a way to get the same effect you want, while only actually making one of these dimensions ever go negative.
Here's what I'm thinking.

Choose which dimension (x or y) you want to basically protect from going negative and create a copy of your image file but flip this copy in that specific direction and save it.

Once you've done that, instead of making both dimensions go to negative 1 at that key frame, make only one do so, and then at the exact half-way point before that key-frame, when both dimensions would be essentially zero, create a key-frame for that image which sets both dimensions to 0.0001 (THIS IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT, do NOT set an images X or Y dimension to perfect zero in a key-frame, this causes problems) AND use Spriter's image-swap feature to swap images to the one which is flipped in the direction which will no longer go to -1.  So, instead of that critical key-frame where both dimensions are set to -1, only one dimension would be negative 1 and the other would just go back to positive one.

This is a little hard to explain clearly with just text. If its unclear or confusion, feel free to email me (mike@brashmonkey.com) your project with a description of which image is supposed to be doing the flipping and I'll see if I can make it work for you.

cheers.
-Mike at BrashMonkey

 

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