I've got a bunch of these coming up, but I'll just use this one thread for them from now on.
Here's the intro episode.
Workflow:
- Spine used for the main character rig with PNG sequence export.
- The facial animation (lips, expressions) are handled in a custom web-based tool I wrote.
- Comping and other animation is in After Effects.
Enjoy!
The latest AtB cartoon. I'm on a mission to make one a week...
As mentioned before, the workflow is a mix of Spine and After Effects animation, with the main Jamie character being mostly Spine-animated.
For this cartoon, I had some smaller character animations I thought I could do more quickly in AE, but... Nope. It's a major pain to fiddle with hiearchies of layers in AE that define a rig. Also, audio scrubbing after SO MANY YEARS is still not available in AE.
So my lesson here is to move animation authoring with more than a few moving parts or significant audio timing into Spine.
Learning from last week’s hassles with complicated rigs in After Effects, I decided to put all the animation for the scene in Spine with the exception of some pans and the credits screen. It worked much more easily.
The latest cartoon. This one has six character rigs in it, and generally, I put a lot more time into it than the previous episodes.
One feature of Spine I started using here was clipping. The problem has come up a few times where some prop or part of the scenery is behind some, but not all of the characters slots The most common case of this for me is when characters sit at a table. Here I want the arms/upper body in front of the table, and the legs/lower body behind (underneath) the table. Or in the still image above, you can see the guy behind the right arm of the chair he is sitting on, but if he lowers his arm, it should go in front of the right chair arm.
Previously, I included the table/prop inside of the character skeleton. But this meant a lot of special-case skeletons and extra images in the atlas. So I like the clipping solution better. I just put the character skeleton in front of the table, and clip out the lower body.
