Today I decided I wanted to do a really simple animation.
The first step was the base parts.
A wing and a body, and I used magikimage to trim them so there was as little as possible white space. This is key when doing rigged animation as having to much empty space can cause stuff to distort and look terrible later.
Then I brought it into Spine, making the other wing by reversing a scale.
Here it is in spine with two bones. One for each wing. I made a mesh so that the wings could be distorted. I did not do a trimmed mesh because that actually made it harder to manipulate since I just want to make it look like the wings are moving.
One thing I am going to do in the next step is replacing the antenea in the drawing with separate assets so I can manipulate them easily.
From here I made three key frames.
The two frames at the start and end are the same which is what makes an nice loop. With the middle one being the wings up.
Learning all this is in preperation for doing more advanced stuff for my game The steppening. I'm essentially going to see how complex and how many features of Spine I can use.
Aspects I'm using next - Skins. Skins are when something replaces something else 1-1 so I could put in a bunch of different wings and change them.
2-Add some other stuff into the scene so I can do a little animation of the butterfly landing on something. (despite it not having legs)
3-changing the base image so the antena can do stuff independently. And maybe making some fuzzy ones for moths.
I also need to tweak it so that the wings don't move outward/inward on the body. I'm going to see if there's something built in that I can use to fix it.
What pleased me a lot with making this is that it only took me about 20 minutes including the artwork which shows how much I've learned over the past few weeks.
