Rant: Pros and cons of puppet animation
Added 2018-09-25 20:00:35 +0000 UTCDoing my first game is something I've always wanted to do since I was like 15. I would fire up my RPGMAKER and play around with the sprites and dialog to make something fun that others might someday enjoy.
Now, 18 years later I'm finally making one for real. But making it is not as easy as I once thought. One of the skills I had to learn was puppet animation. What is puppet animation? well it's animating a character by parts and binding them to a skeleton as opposed to traditional frame by frame animation. Now of course the later is WAY better than the first. You have more options, more control, and looks way more natural.
But doing that would take me a very looooooong time to learn and master, something that I'm not that ready to do. So puppet animation is a quick fix for the game.
As with anything it has it's pros and cons. Articulating the character is the real challenge and if you want to add some weight on those parts is also kinda hard. Now there are ways to make it work, but it's also complicated. Another challenge with this method is making something smooth out of it. Since you work with parts, it's very easy to break the joints.
Also it's not as easy as you might thing, the tutorials and courses out there tend to make puppet animation look easy as pie, but it's not, at least not when you try to make the characters very detailed or with so many parts.
BUT! It's still waaaaay easier than traditional animation and there are a lot of games that work with this method of animation so it's very helpful to animate like this. I can work with a relatively fast process, re use the parts or skeletons for other characters and since I work with a single sprite sheet for the character I save on memory where as with traditional animation it would take up much more space.
There's still so much left to learn for me but I'm really liking how it's coming out :D
Sorry for the rant, just felt like sharing a bit with you :3 Thanks for your support
