Help, I suck at animating!

Should we have a subforum for this kind of thing?

Okay, I'm much more of a programmer than an artist. So, could any of you fine artists help me make this lame bones animation look like a decent running animation?

And if this comes easy to you, would you help me with a few other needed animations?

Edit: I keep doing this lately :s

here's the link: http://octavoarte.cl/caution.cap

Should we have a subforum for this kind of thing?

Okay, I'm much more of a programmer than an artist. So, could any of you fine artists help me make this lame bones animation look like a decent running animation?

And if this comes easy to you, would you help me with a few other needed animations?

Edit: I keep doing this lately :s

here's the link: http://octavoarte.cl/caution.cap

A quick trick: Find a run or walk sequence, make that a sprite or something, stick it behind your little man, then simply move, rotate the pieces to match, moving the background sprite along for each frame. No artistic ability required, just a good selection of source images to work from. You're effectively rotoscoping it then and wont fail to get a decent result if you match up the bone segments with the source.

This is assuming you can see objects in the background when editing bones, I've only looked at them briefly.

Well, my first tip with the bones system is don't start your bones on the hips. Make a "blank" bone and use that as your primary bone object, and attach your hips and everything else to that. That way you can move the hips around as well. It's a little odd when someone is running along and their hips and torso slide steadily along above the ground at exactly the same height.

Second tip: There's a ton of animation reference material on the web. Do like LmK says and google yourself up some. Depending on how you pose your keys you can make a pretty decent run cycle with four to six frames, but too many more might be overkill.

And a sub-forum might not be a bad idea... like a Help/Tech for anything that's non-Construct specific yet still game-creation related. Like how to make pixel art, or how to use Photoshop or Gimp or sound editing software.

You may use this test cap of ours as a reference for bone animating. My animations are rather groovy, basically looks like dancing of some sort (fits the project style), but I'd think it might be good reference for the kind of gameplay demonstrated in the cap.

Arrow keys - move

Shift - jump

CTRL (hold) - run

http://planar-studios.com/files/example/boneanim1.zip

Perhaps its time for a motion capture plug.

Actually its probably doable now, not with bones, but some tweening is possible.

lol Newt

OT:

Jumalauta taas yks suomalainen

Zotged:

I dont understand how you make the bones work in the model..

I cant see there are any bones.. ?

If would be awesome if you could comment on the lines what you are doing so i and others could understand it line by line

Regards

Sigurgeir

Zotged:

I dont understand how you make the bones work in the model..

I cant see there are any bones.. ?

It's the Bone Behavior movement. You apply Bones Behavior to an object, and then you can use that object to control other sprites by moving and rotating them in the animation editor.

Click on the purple rectangle in Zotged's .cap file. You can see in the properties that's the one with Bones. It controls all of the body parts for the player. If you click Edit in the Bones properties, the animation editor will appear.

You're probably going to want to zoom in to work on the figure. Anyway, here's the Bones wiki page, it'll tell you what all that stuff does:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... e_Behavior

Oh and Zotged, you really should rig your bone character to the box by his hips, not his torso. The hips are the center of movement. It's a lot easier to animate that way. If you rotate the torso to make your character bend at the waste then your hips go all out of whack, and then you'll need to move the torso and try to line up the hips where they were before etc. By rigging from the hips you can save yourself a lot of needless hassle.

You may use this test cap of ours as a reference

Holy, that's some good animation!

I just want a stickman that doesn't look like he has brain damage XD

I'll take my own advice and the one given here... and film some references.

Nice tip about the root bone btw. Didn't know that.

Also, I wish the bone animator was more comfortable to use

Ooo Ooo! I have a cap of a lovely stick man movement animation system for you!

Heres the animations You can use whatever you want. I can do more for you too, cause I am the other way around. I'm more of an artist than a programer. All the crap in there is placeholder, I was learning construct and building my movement system.

P.S. I can't open your .cap, It says "out of memory"

I'm aiming at a bones behavior animation, can you do those?

You can use Construct 997 to open my file, though it's not much to see there but a single bad animation

I'm still on the newb side of construct, but I have experimented with bones a bit. I can have a go at it though .

that'd be cool, thats what I'm trying to do.

The bones behavior could also use some work.... it's not very comfortable to use, and animations are very core to a game!

I'm thinking I'll have to open up motion reference separately and place it side-to-side with construct, copying manually. Yeah, that'll do.

Hey, I've been working on the bone animation, and for some reason the "repeat to" check box dosn't seem to work right. Anyway, I had a nice looking running animation going on, but since I couldn't get it to repeat to a sertan frame, every time he returned to a standing position again. Thaught I was deleting the standing frames, when I realized that it wouldn't delete frame one, and was deleting all of my others . I can make a running and walking, jumping and such animations for you if you want them, but I also need a bit of help (remember, I'm no good at the tech side fo construct yet).

:Rave:

In one of my two games I am trying (and failing) to produce, I would like to add sound. I've been all over the documentation and I tried to watch the vid (which for some reason wouldn't work) but I cannot figure out how to specify where the Xaudio2 pulls the sound from . It starts "appath & "example.wav", but I don't know how to specify the path, if I put C:\Users\Administrato\Desktop\Construct stuf\soundfx It returns "\ invalid charector"

I'm begining to think that I am hopeless at producing something ..... I have spent many hours on this, and I'm not planning on giving up though.

Deadeye:"It's like being handed a box of crayons, and the first thing you say is "Hmm... nice crayons and all, but could I draw a cat with these crayons? Because I seriously doubt someone could draw a cat with these crayons."

Lost My Keys:"Very true, but it's never as black and white as that. To use your crayon cat analogy. Yes, you can draw a cat with these crayons. But can they?"

I'm trying my best at drawing that freaking cat, but I feal like I need extra help every step of the way. I would like to help how I can, so I won't be the annoying noob that just asks stupid questions and never contributes. After much ado, here's your cat, erm, cap.

Hey, I've been working on the bone animation, and for some reason the "repeat to" check box dosn't seem to work right. Anyway, I had a nice looking running animation going on, but since I couldn't get it to repeat to a sertan frame, every time he returned to a standing position again. Thaught I was deleting the standing frames, when I realized that it wouldn't delete frame one, and was deleting all of my others . I can make a running and walking, jumping and such animations for you if you want them, but I also need a bit of help (remember, I'm no good at the tech side fo construct yet).

:Rave:

In one of my two games I am trying (and failing) to produce, I would like to add sound. I've been all over the documentation and I tried to watch the vid (which for some reason wouldn't work) but I cannot figure out how to specify where the Xaudio2 pulls the sound from . It starts "appath & "example.wav", but I don't know how to specify the path, if I put C:\Users\Administrato\Desktop\Construct stuf\soundfx It returns "\ invalid charector"

I'm begining to think that I am hopeless at producing something ..... I have spent many hours on this, and I'm not planning on giving up though.

Deadeye:"It's like being handed a box of crayons, and the first thing you say is "Hmm... nice crayons and all, but could I draw a cat with these crayons? Because I seriously doubt someone could draw a cat with these crayons."

Lost My Keys:"Very true, but it's never as black and white as that. To use your crayon cat analogy. Yes, you can draw a cat with these crayons. But can they?"

I'm trying my best at drawing that freaking cat, but I feal like I need extra help every step of the way. I would like to help how I can, so I won't be the annoying noob that just asks stupid questions and never contributes. After much ado, here's your cat, erm, cap.

are you putting the path and file inside quotes? "AppPath" & "filename.ext" Try that?