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Here's an old one!  Something that I sadly never finished, but now may have reason to...  But first, a little detour.

Apart from finishing the Candice pinup, so far I don't have much planned for the rest of the month.  There are at least a few ideas I had to hold off on while working on the comic, but so far I haven't really latched onto any of them in a "I need to draw this NOW!" way.  With the month getting shorter - and my AC apparently not functioning - I'm tempted to turn off billing and make this a free month.  But if I get this one contract, I may need to do the same next month...

If I don't get that contract - the client did experience some sticker shock when we gave them a quote - what then?  Apart from some of those on-hold ideas, I'm tempted to try some 2.5D animation!

While I'd like to make a 2D platformer, animating, inking, and coloring all of the sprites would be quite time-consuming.  A better alternative might be to only draw a few keyframes, turn them into cutouts, and use bones to blend between them.  Since I've never used this technique before, I figured this animation of Daisy might be a good one to test it out on!  But first I'll need to figure out how to construct the 2D puppet.

Any thoughts?

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Comments

Anonymous

Wish I had any input to give but this is sadly all greek to me.

Marauder6272

you could render the animation as a .png sequence with an alpha channel and just put it on a polygon. That's what I did with old 2D explosion sprites when I put them into 3d scenes.

Marauder6272

oh, and I love this animation. I hope you do finish it ;p

Anonymous

Side note, I can't wait to see what you manage to do with this older gif. I love this thing.

David Haring

*uses a sock puppet with googly eyes glued on and some big pompoms as breasts* I like the idea of puppets! Puppets make everything more fun.

Anonymous

Well, if you want to try your hand at 2d animation you could try Spine. If you want a free program, you can use Dragon Bones which does much the same thing. Draw your model, split it into separate files for the different moving parts and then set up a skeleton rig to make it move.

Anonymous

A pretty good example of what you can do with spine. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twUz99ek5do" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twUz99ek5do</a>

Stush Cinta

Heck yeah, this animation is so good~ Love your work! Maybe see what you can find out about the production of anime fighting games? A lot of them use the 3D model used as sprites method.

jklind

I think that's how Unity handles sprites in general, actually. At the very least it'd be much simpler than exporting a 2D puppet with a whole mess of bones.

jklind

Spine keeps coming up, I probably should give it a look sooner or later...

jklind

That actually depresses me some, especially if I think back to Darkstalkers, which had some of the best animation of any 2D game...

Stush Cinta

Yeah, I totally get that, I was always a huge fan of sprite stuff, Have you seen Guilty Gear Xrd, though? I still can't get over the fact that that game is 3D, it's the most beautiful looking thing i've ever seen.

Ruro

It is pretty great and very easy to learn if you already know other graphics tools, there used to be a free alternative named DragonBonesPro but they seem to charge nowadays so Spine is probably the safer bet, they seem to have very good support and seem to listen to their community, for what it's worth i have on several occasions considered suggesting this program to you as i think it would really fit your style. Also Shantae HGH was animated using it.

Anonymous

DragonBones Pro is still a thing and I have used it, it can just be hard to learn everything that you want to do with it because there are not a lot of video tutorials. Documentation for it seems to be decent, but there isn't a lot of self help resources if something isn't working the way you think it should.

Ruro

Last i tried it a few months ago it seemed to lack features it used to have after i had updated it, looking at it now i don't know what it was it was lacking and i can't seem to find the buy button on their site either, maybe i'm just crazy but i could have sworn it was a thing. Either way it's a good tool, if it is actually still free it's at the very least a good way to prepare for Spine as the workflow is almost identical and i think they have compatible save file formats but don't quote me on that, haven't actually tried it myself.

Ikusame

I've seen you mention that animation before, I feel like its going to keep bothering you until you finish it.

jklind

Personally I'm tempted to stick with Maya on this one. It may not be the most efficient in the long run, but I already know my way around it, and I can write my own tools to speed things up if this seems like something I'll continue to do more of.

jklind

I don't know why, I never really got into the GG series. Now I've kinda lost my taste for fighting games in general...

jklind

I'd chalk it up to the art equivalent of blue balls. I want to animate my characters - in 3D, though - but it takes so much effort just to get there. Even if I tackle this animation in 2.5D, it'll take some effort to figure out how best to break the drawings up into a puppet.