So I'm back with part 2 for The Lost Ghost. To animate this artwork, I'm going to use Esoteric Software's Spine. It's a bit pricey (US$299) but it's one of the best 2D animating software I've used. The only reason why I've decided to buy it was because I was also using it to animate my sprites in my game.
Chopping up the parts!
Using any software (in my case, it's Photoshop), I saved the parts separately as .PNG. I then import them to Spine..
Attaching to Bones
Spine animates images using the skeletal feature. You basically attach 'bones' to the images you have and move them when you move the bones.
Meshing
You can also use the Mesh feature to take advantage of Spine's FFD (Free Form Deformation). This will give my animation a "3D" feel.
Weights
This step is an additional step to meshing. The weights is attached to the bones so that you don't have to manipulate the FFD manually.
The red bone controls the red points, while the yellow bones control the yellow points. You can also assign them to both by sharing the percentage of control. (50%-50% or 25%-75%, depends on what you want)
Animation w/ Bones
Adding all that together, I then move the bones in the timeline.
Animation w/o Bones
So this is what it looks like without the bones.
I hope you liked my post and I hope you find this art process worth your while. I'll try to post more. -
Bye for now!
-lires