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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)

:)


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