overlapping the knee and thigh so the leg can bend without breaking.) He also positions the character in a number of key poses. He does a great job of organizing his characters with their necessary articulation in mind (e.g. Mike still uses the same character design process described in his earlier blog post. From a game design standpoint, these enemies are an ideal transition from the wild, unorganized tribesmen to the heavily armored, well trained formations of the Legionnaires. They were less formally trained and wore lighter armor than the traditional Legionnaires. Historically, the Auxiliary were composed of conquered tribesmen seeking Roman citizenship. For this post I’ll be using one of our newer enemies, the Roman Auxiliary. With that tedium out of the way, let’s talk about the basics of animating a new character. This whole process had to be figured out relatively quickly as all other development was forced to a halt for the duration of the transition. At this point, Brian was able to (painfully) script an import tool for all of our characters and save the animations we had. Once I had the skeleton built, the Flash files needed to be refined once again. I had to figure out how each character’s skeleton would work. The characters were not initially designed with a skeletal hierarchy in mind.Īlthough we were able to make the unrefined animations work with Smooth Moves, the change to Spine would mean a whole new layout for our characters. Unfortunately, Spine was a whole new beast. By painstakingly cleaning and organizing the Flash files, we were able to export the animation information and import it into Smooth Moves. Initial Hurdle – Converting the Originalsīefore we even began on the project, Mike had the characters designed and animated in Flash. Combined with very regular updates and advanced features like skinning and mesh deformations, Spine was simply the best choice for us.
#Esoteric software spine one skeleton multiple poses software
Most importantly, the guys at Esoteric Software provide a library of Spine Runtimes that allow for a smooth workflow between both Unity and 2D Toolkit, the 2D sprite system we chose to use. Multiple skins allow us to create an even wider variety of enemy appearances without needing a multitude of animation files. It allows for easy swapping of images per bone as well a keyable draw order. We kept a close eye on the project because it appeared to both meet our criteria and offer a slew of additional features that could be used to enhance our animations. When we began our development, Esoteric Software was running their second Kickstarter for Spine. Spine is a 2D skeletal animation tool by Esoteric Software designed specifically for use in 2D games. However, we have since changed to an external application called Spine. Smooth Moves was extremely useful in getting our animations from flash into Unity and allowed us to edit them within the engine.
In Brian’s first blog post about the development process and external development tools, he talks about the Unity plug-in Smooth Moves. Due to the vast nature of this topic it’s easy for me to get sidetracked or start rambling so I will try to stay focus on the basics of the process. Animations are a key aspect of the game’s combat experience and overall aesthetics. The past few months I’ve been keeping my nose to the grindstone in our animation systems and thought it was about time share a glimpse of our process. With Mike busy capturing the majestic British landscape in extreme, stylized detail, the animations have fallen to me and our other animator Denis. I also assist Mike with asset creation so he can focus his time where it’s needed most. It’s my job to make Mike’s art and our programming come together in wonderful ways. For that, we, the Wulverblade team, apologize. With all of the exciting work going on and work left to do, blogging can quickly fall by the wayside.
Evan Doody here with my first official blog post! This post has been a long time coming.