AuthorTopic: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge  (Read 15679 times)

Offline astraldata

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #10 on: October 29, 2014, 08:21:54 pm
I just want to say -- I just now realized you were Camus from the old forums. xP I'm Ace from back then. I think I remember you having an avatar of a swat-looking guy stand-shooting and then kneeling to shoot. Was that you? (I know you've had your current avatar for a long time, even back then, so I may be misremembering.)

---

That said, I think what rikfuzz meant was that at all the keyframe points in your previous version seemed to rigidly "pause" for a moment around the start of each one. The "pauses" are somewhat hard to see if you stare at it too long, but it's clear that something's off due to the length of the animation and the number of points of specific articulation. In your new version, you seem to mitigate the "pauses" by removing that key where the axe is just coming up to his shoulders just before the anticipation for the strike itself. The arc of the swing is also better represented in your new animation, especially where the stretch frame is involved.

I think your biggest problem in your new one is the spacing is a bit fast from lifting the axe to over his head since you removed that keyframe. The keyframe should have been placed somewhere between the shoulders and closer to the start of the swing (rather than removed completely). Also, in your previous version, the time it took to lift the axe to the start of the anticipation for the swing greatly contributed to those perceived "pauses" to the start of the other keys, giving the appearance that it was 'stopping' at the exact moments where it should've been speeding up (of which those were mainly off due to the arc of the swing being off too much, causing the somewhat 'jerky' appearance of the attack -- though, like I said, it appears to be fixed in the new version).


---


Anyhow, I just wanted to say that I'd like to get any information whatsoever on how to go about this style of animation. I know that mesh deformation has a lot to do with how they made odin sphere, muramasa, and rayman graphics move as if they're hand-drawn, but I would mainly like to know the professional process in which they know which parts (and how to draw them) to begin with.

I've been fiddling with this for a while now, and, so far, all I've gathered (mostly from Dan Fessler) is that they do some sort of hand-drawn animation to help them decide what parts to draw for a given character. That's not enough though.

The problem is, I don't understand any decent workflow for going about that. If I've already hand-drawn the character animations (from what I understand is to help me figure out which parts to draw and how to draw them), why would I bother making them modular? We'll assume we're not doing an RPG with equippable items, etc. -- Sure, it might save *some* time, but I don't see how it would tell you what parts you need if your hand-drawn animations were as simple as possible (i.e. skeletons). To draw them as anything else, you might as well just paint in your lines at that point.

If you're going modular, with size/shape/orientation of the body parts somehow defined by the animation in a magically practical way, the time it takes to tweak the curves, precisely place each arm/foot/etc. along an arc of movement, swapping images out to resemble hand-drawn animation on certain frames, specifying the mesh for each image part, manipulating that mesh for each frame, tweaking the whole animation, adding squash & stretch, and everything else involved doesn't seem too much faster than simply drawing over your animation skeletons with nice lines and painting them in with the proper tools to achieve a superior look.

Even if a monkey could reposition the limbs, you still have to have the animation skill to know how to keep it from looking like a paper-cutout doll, so wouldn't you still need as many skilled animators on your team?

That being said, I'm simply playing Devil's Advocate here -- anyone with the knowledge to answer any of my questions here with some concrete ideas on process/workflows would be greatly appreciated by myself and others. I'd love to take the plunge into modular animation myself, but I would prefer to know how to 'dive' before I actually dive in, and the information on this subject is surprisingly sparse. :(
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Offline Indigo

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #11 on: October 30, 2014, 12:34:29 am
I think I remember you having an avatar of a swat-looking guy stand-shooting and then kneeling to shoot. Was that you? (I know you've had your current avatar for a long time, even back then, so I may be misremembering.)

that was Pawige

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #12 on: October 30, 2014, 12:46:17 am
nope, the guy with the avatar that kneeled to shoot was Pawige....I think he might even still have it  :crazy:...I've certainly seen it in this White pixelation. I'm sorry to say I dont really remember you.... :-[ it's amazing how awful I am at remembering people, I only remember people I talked to A LOT....  :ouch: (maybe if you post some work from that time?) You can see what kind of animation I did in that "sprite" section of  my blog :p pretty much just have old stuff

I know about the rushed anticipation in the new one...it's a tentative tweak to see if I got what he meant, not an "improved" version....I'm liking that about this kind of animation, you can have something to show more easily, it's more iterative. I'm glad we got both the same thing out of Rikfuzz'es post, I'm keeping an eye out for that kind of mistake from now on.

About the vanillaware thing, people are already doing it in spine, check this out:
http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=16333#p16333
I dont have Spine version that can do mesh deformation so I dont know exactly how this works (does he have to manually deform everything every keyframe so it looks ok or does it naturally bend correctly?). I get by with just rotating, moving  and scaling parts, but there it is.

About how to imagine what parts you need for what poses....I'm at a loss about that myself :p it's what I least like about this whole process.
You can go and download top production quality dolls and look at them if you want. For flash there is the "My Little Pony: friendship is magic" dolls (hey, it's well animated regardless of how you like the show :p) and also the main character from Guacamelee is available to download if you buy their game. Tell me if you find more dolls...specially from Rumblefish...I still think it's one of the best examples.

I tried to do what they seem to do, which is redraw parts for every new pose, I even made that SWF where all the poses are hand drawn so I had a very spontaneous guide to start from, and I was sure I had the perfect method but I had some problems

-drawing every pose beforehand and trying to imitate it it is not very smart with spine, I do a lot of stretching in my drawing, it's so prevalent I often do it with no real purpose, so trying to recreate it in spine all the time became tedious and somewhat pointless. it did help me find the kind of timing I wanted though.
-drawing the pose with new parts, then making every part posed perpenticular so that I could export it from AI, then import it in spine and get it back in the same pose I had in AI was very time consuming, not to mention the antithesis of the spontaneity of just drawing a new frame in normal handdrawn animation  :yell:
(Indigo...how do you do it?  :o)
-this polygonal style requires a LOT of tweaking when you're placing parts, moving them in weird ways so the part where the model breaks doesnt show, this made for a very start and stop process every time I animated something.
-turns out I was already consuming more atlas than I should with just two poses where I used new parts for everything.

MY temporal solution was this dummy with round joints, which doesn't need any new parts whatsoever. it's not compatible with the polygon aesthetic of the game and the antithesis of what I wanted to do, but I needed to just animate, and this is the best way to do it in this technique.
When I actually add back the skin this character I will try to remove the round joints for style, I will see the need for new parts, and I may or may not draw them depending on available time and available space in the atlas.

I wanted to do EVERY cool thing ever for this technique but I may end up trying to get the most out of the most basic form of puppet animation..oh well, live and learn :p

Industry wise, the average of seconds produced with this kind of animation IS greater than fully hand drawn. Even John kricfalusy which is completely puritanic about not using tweens ended up inmersed in this. Obviously you still need professionals with a sense of timing to do it, but I would wager that the automatic tweening does help a lot even if there is still a lot of redrawing (I would imagine specially when you can tweak the movement graph...it does make for ease ins and overshots with no extra keys)
« Last Edit: October 30, 2014, 01:17:15 am by Conceit »

Offline astraldata

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #13 on: October 30, 2014, 04:28:06 am
Pawige! That's right -- thanks Dan! Sorry about that Conceit -- Also, thanks. It's been some years now. A lot has happened in that time for me. Its just Pawige kept me interested in pixel-based animation back in the day when I asked him how he did his avatar -- I remember getting frustrated with it to the point of almost giving up pixel art since I didn't know any of the tricks for animation in Graphics Gale at that time. Now that I know he's over on PJ, I'll just have to stop by over there and say thanks to him too! :)


-- Regarding Modular animation: --

As for deciding on the parts to draw, I'm glad I'm not the only one dreading that part of the process. I think if we knew how people approached this issue for film/tv, we might have a better idea of how to go about it. Those guys generally have a *lot* more stuff to draw than those of us using the process for game development. That being said, if the method Dan suggested comes from that field, I'm thinkin' maybe it's best to come up with a method more suited for games ourselves.

Tbh, I wouldn't think that it would be useful in film/tv to pre-draw your 'animations' anywhere but in the storyboarding process. I can see that being useful to determine what parts you'll need. I can see some equivalent being useful for games when thinking about it this way.

With that said however, what I see in practice with games like Muramasa and Odin Sphere (judging by the few parts sheets that are available), they appear to be animating many individual parts as if they're flipbooked, with only the upper-torso rotations, hands, feet, and stuff with follow-through (hair/drapery/etc.) containing the most frames:






Without reference, this particular character sheet is very difficult to follow due to all the drapery and overlapping parts all over the character...

BUT -- with that being said -- being 'hard to follow' visually might very well be the point for the two main character designs in Muramasa.


-- MY theory on the "hand-drawn" modular animation style is this: --

The drapery and other details are intended to hide exact angles of the bones in the shoulders, elbows, knees, and hips (in particular), which will allow for a lot greater mesh deformation options than a redraw of a forearm and shoulders, for example, might allow. By hiding the areas where the most complicated joint connections appear, you avoid having to redraw an entire section of a character's body for the sake of an obscure joint angle, allowing mesh deformations to take their place.

As you might notice, the other characters in the game tend to have very few unique animation frames -- especially NPC characters, who mostly rely on these mesh deformations.

The characters who *do* have more animation frames don't generally have very many when they've got their entire torso + arms and hips + thighs showing (i.e. boss-type characters):




A good example of a clever way of hiding the joints in an exposed set of hips is the above red demon (tengu) character -- his stomach + grass skirt hides the joints where his legs would connect with his hip-bone and his chest clearly hides one shoulder while the other foreground shoulder + arm overlaps the chest, reducing the number of images required to articulate him by doing so.

In addition to obscuring the character's joints by overlapping other parts, another clever trick was used in the demon character to smooth the skin transition from around the shoulders/arms to their attachment to the torso -- the very heavy shadows. The heavy shadowing allows anything to merge to the torso as long as it connects with the shadowed areas. That's why heavily-shadowed characters work more easily with modular animation. Concentrating heavy shadows around joint areas really helps pull transitions to other less-obscured parts off -- like the red demon's arms, for example.

That said, as far as I can tell, most cutout game characters have 2 views -- either mostly straight-on (usually with knees bent in a specific direction, like the red guy, who can use his sideways knees for both torso angles if necessary) or mostly a 2D profile view (like the guy in the below image). I've rarely seen a straight-standing character from the front that hasn't been mostly redrawn for each frame. Correct me if I'm wrong here anyone, because the girl in the scene below is one prominent example I am basing my assumption off of:



Anyway, that's where I stand right now in my current understanding of me reverse-engineering this process. Anyone with any ideas on anything I've said, especially regarding a proper workflow to determine which parts are needed for a given character design, feel free to chime in! :)


« Last Edit: November 01, 2014, 07:04:08 am by astraldata »
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Offline Conzeit

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #14 on: October 31, 2014, 02:50:07 pm
sigh, I still dont have the eye to see trough a sheet like that. that is very cool thank you  :crazy:


I agree with you about Muramasa/Odin sphere, it's very very smooth but it's very obviuously moving only sideways, and characters look a bit robotic emotionally, so I had never looked into it.

Your points are very true tho and that means that style relies heavily on mesh deformation....if you took it away it'd be almost impossible to make it work, unlike with Dragon's Crown. (sigh...I have a lot of robed characters I'll have to find a solution for that myself :p)

I wonder if they do what I've done so far which is just to animate a regular doll, and afterwards they make a new part where it's obvious the model broke.

The reason I keep coming back to Rumblefish is they have moves where a character lunges forward rotates his torso and delivers a strong blow and trough it all the parts change accordingly and it looks very good, I dont think I really see that with anything else, even Dragon's Crown....but I wonder if it's just the low resolution that sells it to me?
« Last Edit: October 31, 2014, 03:06:08 pm by Conceit »

Offline astraldata

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #15 on: November 01, 2014, 08:06:48 am
I added in a few additional observations in my previous post I thought were interesting points I failed to mention earlier.

--

As far as Rumblefish is concerned, much of the execution was very well done. I imagine they used the process Dan mentioned on his blog (i.e. starting out with traditional animation to attempt to see what parts they needed), which ultimately required them to pixel over quite a lot of drawings, but saving them mostly in-betweens (which likely still saved them some money since they were using pure pixel art anyway). They used a lot of redraws, but they also use some mesh deformation in there as well (you can see this more prominently in some of the breathing animations of the more rounded character forms).

That said, I keep coming back to moves like that guy's "Modular Pixel Pile Driver" (watch out -- it's PPD's arch nemesis! D:)

It may have been budget constraints, but it was pretty gross to look at, and a fairly solid reminder of where pixels and modular animation just don't work so well together. Though, when mixed with mesh deformation and ample redraws (like in RumbleFish), these issues can be mitigated somewhat.

There are also games (like Magicite) that treat pixel-based FFD like an art-style, and that particular instance works well due to the characters essentially being treated like single-frame "Paper Mario" styled cardboard cutouts with almost no frame-by-frame animations. In fact, the less frame-by-frame animation in these FFD style pixel animations, the better they tend to look.

This is the reason why RumbleFish works so well -- mesh deformation aside, when they *do* use modular animation techniques, they only use those for in-betweens or other subtle movements, essentially retaining that "cardboard cutout" styled FFD on the parts they use the modular techniques on. Essentially mimicking Magicite -- just on a slightly larger scale (i.e. with entire sections of a character's body on an otherwise *static* frame of animation). As long as the part itself doesn't change *while* it's being distorted, your eye won't catch it and it won't look 'off' to you. When the next frame is required, new FFD is applied to it if necessary, but in a different way, and the rest of the body tends to change too as well, leading your eye to perceive a larger change, thus leading to more fluidity in that change than could be provided by a simple redraw.

Despite its look, I'm positive RumbleFish's character sheets are much larger than Muramasa's in terms of unique parts requirements, especially with mesh deformations and FFD frames subtracted, simply because it's a fighting game. That said -- the number of unique sprites in the game are likely still less than games like the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero series. ;)

But yeah, I do agree with you on the charm of the low-resolution hand-animated appearance of the RumbleFish games. I really do think the uniqueness of the low-res combined with the obviously modular (and modern) style stands out a bit. However, the animation technique in it is almost exactly the same as that in Muramasa -- just with the mesh deformation executed to a somewhat lesser extent.

Yet there are still many moments in RumbleFish2 that you can see that mesh deformation really well -- especially in the more 3D-looking idle frames you know are just pixel art, but your eye still tries to tell you they're 3D models somehow. With the mesh deformation overhead, it's probably still almost as much work as hand-drawing all the frames, but it does achieve a look many games don't attempt, likely for that very reason (and possibly another reason is because pixel art is also a very specialized skill).
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Offline Conzeit

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #16 on: November 02, 2014, 09:19:20 pm
are you sure there's FFD in Rumblefish 1 or 2? I've looked at a lot of it and havent really noticed anything that REQUIRES it, I think it's just the characters are cleverly designed to not show their joints and very subtly rotated....there might be a little bit of it in the joints...but I havent seen anything that makes me convinced.

BTW found a topic at Mugenguild where there's a character available for download.
http://mugenguild.com/forum/PHPSESSID.ojinh12aful6mjd9g9m82lmhr6/topics/request-wuwos-rumble-fish-sprite-rips-150340.0.html

the character parts have some pretty damn weird shapes. Looks like they're not designed to rotate much at all, supporting what we all thought of drawing by hand first, making parts later

This guy Felo claims to have more but I think he never uploaded em and I'm pretty sure he left Mugen...=/ (Saw a topic about that on Prime Central Station)
« Last Edit: November 03, 2014, 04:06:13 am by Conceit »

Offline Alex Sinigaglia

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #17 on: November 06, 2014, 09:55:20 am
Felo_Llop didn't leave Mugen. I'll ask him about the rips.



He re-uploaded them: http://mugenguild.com/forum/topics/rumble-fish-163247.msg2043527.html;topicseen#msg2043527

The rips were done by Wuwo who was a Mugenchina user.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2014, 10:39:42 am by Alex Sinigaglia »

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Puppet/modular animation: taking the plunge

Reply #18 on: November 07, 2014, 02:54:07 am
Thanks Alex! and extended thanks to Felo. read all about who ripped it in mugenguild ( ;_; mugenchina ). I have my share of Wuwo rips too, I've been stalking mugen communities for ages for their rips :p Glad to hear Felo is ok =)

Oh these rumblefish dolls, they have such strange shapes, like they're not meant to be joints at all. I'll have to put one together to see how they work
« Last Edit: November 07, 2014, 03:24:59 am by Conceit »