New To Construct and have a few Questions

Hi to the Construct community.

I would like to know if using my skills as a former 3d animator, creating say

lightning effects and particle effects from Lightwave and using said Lightwave

for creating my objects and my own effects for use in Construct is possible?

I was a 3D Character animator, so I would also like to create characters for my own games,

can I do this with Construct? meaning create the character animations and

import them like in a .PNG animation?

I also use Flash and many of the adobe products, how would they be useful for

my work in Construct?

I guess I'm asking what exactly what are my limitations when creating some of the

graphics and effects i want to?

I'm new to creating games and truly, there are so many ways to turn to get started and

I do not know really where to start.

Would anyone be able to suggest a good starting point or how you would proceed?

A learning path.

Right now I'm doing the beginners tutorials.

Many thanks

Kosh

You're on the right track. If you read up on importing graphics you will see that you can import spritesheets for your animations, and even drag-drop an animated gif straight into a project and C2 will work it out for you. There are also plugins for some packages like Spriter. Others more knowledgeable about this will chime in soon I'm sure. Keep reading and learning

Thank you

koshnaranick

Welcome

C2 is definitely easy to understand and get used to it, but like any other program, is hard to master.

For better 2D animations, you should look at Spriter (since you are already familiar with Adobe Flash and 3D models).

I'm using 3d max for my character and export the frames as png then upload it to C2.

I also come from a 3D background and there are definitely some workflow adjustments that you'll have to make. Rendering animation cycles and background images will be your best bet, but be sure to conform to the techniques mentioned in the memory optimisation blog post, otherwise you'll end up with gigantic games that will struggle to run on even a desktop.

In terms of particles, I think your best bet will be to learn to properly use the built-in particle system instead of rendering from Lightwave. Create a really nice particle in Photoshop or whatever and then drop it into Construct. The system isn't as evolved as those found in 3D design software, but it gets the basics done very well. More advanced results can be achieved with WebGL effects and blending, using multiple stacked particle emitters, or creating a custom emitter from scratch (using the bullet behaviour or even custom movement). If you're used to working with interactive particles (like rain drops that create splashes) then the custom emitter will be the way to go.

Personally, I've found that Construct is a hell of a fun tool from a technical artistry perspective. You can get a lot done if you learn the tools and learn how to optimise as you go. Here's a little demo (unrelated to particle effects) that I made recently to show off some yummy parallax testing. It's not terribly well optimised but with some tweaking could be scaled up to full game size.

Thank you Geo for this reply, I really appreciate it.

And thank you to everyone else as well.

I will begin looking into all that you suggested and since I'm at the beginning stages, I will be bothering you all a lot

on this forum. I apologize in advance.

One other Question;

When adding the Mouse or Keyboard object, in the bar at the top appears

a countdown that says something along the way of "Will be Applied to whole Project"

or something and counts down and then the bar disappears.

What exactly is it talking about?