nope, the guy with the avatar that kneeled to shoot was Pawige....I think he might even still have it
...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....
(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#p16333I 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
(Indigo...how do you do it?
)
-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)