Re: Main character animations.

[Katie Lauren Lucas <katie@fysh.org>]

Quoting Al Riddoch <ajr@ecs.soton.ac.uk>:

> On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 12:51:46PM +0100, Katie Lauren Lucas wrote:
> > Quoting Al Riddoch <alriddoch@zepler.org>:
> > > I would be very interested to know what tools you are planning to
> use
> > > to
> > > create your content. Have you found an available set of animation
> tools
> > > for
> > > Linux, or are you fortunate enough to have access to the high-end
> > > proprietary
> > > tools?
> > 
> > At the rate things are going, I will be creating a paint package as
> part of the 
> > project to paint the damn images with. Nothing I've yet come across
> counts as 
> > what I'd consider a suitable tool for drawing animation frames with.
> > 
> > I can't find anything that will let me have: a window with a x8 view
> of an 
> > image in it, with another image "ghosted" below it to use for
> onion-skinning 
> > the animation, plus having two other windows running animations in
> them, one at 
> > (say) x4 and one normal size. And allow me to paint in any of them..
> > 
> > So the answer here is "I'm assuming I'm going to need to write a
> proprietry 
> > high-end tool." :-)
> > 
> > Or use Gimp and suffer the slings and arrows that come along with not
> having 
> > the right tool for the job.
> > 
> 
> You are planning to create the animations in a paint package?

<grin> I'm an 8bit programmer at heart.

> The approach we have always taken with this, which I understand is
> the approach used by professionals, is to create the animations in 3d,
> and use a high quality renderer to generate the 2d frames. Packages
> like
> Poser are available to the this in one package, but are quite costly.
> In WorldForge we have created tools which generate pre-rendered 2d
> animations
> from 3d animated cal3d character animations, but so far we have no
> affordable or open way of creating cal3d animations. The only viable
> way
> appears to be to use 3d studio max.

These are tiny sprites 16x16pixels up to 32x32 - I tried rendering 3D stuff 
down to the right sizes and it Just Doesn't Work.

_______________________________________________________________________________
      Katie Lauren Lucas, Consultant Software Engineer, Parasol Solutions
katie@fysh.org katie.lucas@parasolsolutions.com http://www.parasolsolutions.com