Friday 3 February 2012

Zombies are a go!

So all four zombie types have been animated, I still have to swap out the animations with the other zombie skins but that shouldn't take too long. I played around with the bone tool and I've currently learned a lot, though I don't know if it will be directly useful for this project.

I know now that you can only have one 'bone' for every movieclip, so in order to connect the arms to the shoulders and the legs to the hips, the torso has to be split up into 2-3 segments. I also learned that you animating more complex characters, which is just about all of mine, it's best to have knee caps and elbows to allow for the gaps to not be as evident. I also learned that color options- alpha isn't something that can be selected for 'boned' objects, unlike motion-tween'ed objects, so the movieclip containing the animation would have to be alpha'ed and that doesn't allow for individual parts to be alpha'ed.

Since I only animated one zombie using the bone tool, and will most likely go back and redo it later on, I had to do a lot more motion tween animations and along the way I learned a few things about those as well. When doing several animations in one movieclip( attack 1, attack 2, healing, death) it's best to copy and paste the start/end frame to start a new animation. This way if your animation points don't become too unmanageable and if something does screw up, it's limited to just that one animation, instead of messing up all the animations and forcing you to painfully go back and re-position the object for every key-frame. I also learned that when just moving objects, it's best to press 'v' and use the normal selection tool, this makes sure that your only moving the object and not it's motion path.

Overall, I'm making good progress and I'm diffidently on track again :)


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