Skip to main content

7 directions

I got over the lack of a North direction in the animations by giving each infantry man a default "north" facing when they are created. This will be either North West or North East randomly.

That way there's a little more variation in their appearance.


Making a good 4 frame walk animation is not that easy, it tends to look a bit like they are moonwalking. Still, being able to fit all the animations for one infantry man variant on a single sheet makes up for it.

I changed the default animation (and prone default, trench default etc...) to be a fidget animation. This has a lot more movement (checking the gun, looking around etc...) and only plays 10% of the time, when the infantry man is idle. This should stop the infantry looking so static when they are just standing around waiting for orders.

I gave the troopers a blue uniform, somewhat similar to those worn by Austria-Hungary armies during WWI. I think this gives more of the pan-European look I wanted.

It's funny, this takes me back to when I used to make mods for Civilization 3. Back then I used to cut and paste the individual frames together manually.
It took hours!!!
These days I know how to code in python, so I wrote a PIL script which puts everything together in seconds, and then another script in blender to cut up the frames and prepare them for animation.
It takes just seconds to get it ready for going in the game. If I don't like how an animation looks I can fix it, re-render and run the scripts right away.

These days being able to code is essential for a game artist I think.

Here's a look at one I made earlier: (c2002)

:)


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra...
7 comments
Read more

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.
6 comments
Read more

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...
3 comments
Read more