Looking for 2D Spine Animator [FREELANCE]

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

I was browsing through the Spine Forum looking for freelance animators. Are you still available? If so, I was wondering how much you would charge and I'll try to keep it brief with what I want to do.

I'm working on a game I want to do for fun, but the game engine only supports 2D. I have Spine 2D Professional, but I'm not good at it (which is why I'm looking for freelancers). I'm also still working on drawing characters, but I think I'll wait on that.

For now, I used ZBrush to quickly sculpt a low-poly male and female character and exported them as individual sprites. This is not how the game will look like, but the ZBrush sprites will provide a close representation on what the game characters will look like. The rigging of the characters and animation outputs is a little weird, but eventually I'll find time to hand-draw them.

What I need is a freelancer to help take the sprites I've generated, cut and arrange the body parts in a way that makes sense for the character animation. It doesn't have to be perfect and doesn't have to look exactly like the the sprite animation images. It just has to look good. The game characters can walk in 8 directions (N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E, NE). The left side can of course be a mirror of the right.

The main focus will be just taking the sprites I have and arranging them in a way to re-use the body parts to focus on animation.

NateAdmin

In ZBrush, I've outputted the characters I've sketched out into separate images for sprites. I just need you to cut up these sprites into separate body parts for animating. I didn't cut up any body parts, as I don't know your style of animation and I'm not good at animating in Spine. Maybe it'll probably help if you see the images visually, which means I need to get them to you somehow. I'm not expecting perfection with these animations either - just that they look good/decent. I also don't want to over burden you, so having an overall look at each image pose and figuring out which body parts you can re-use in various animations and making use of vertices to fake a twisting of the arm, leg, etc... can help you figure out the essential body parts to cut up and rig for all the various animations?

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

I'm fine with the hourly rate, as long as it's reasonable (i.e not taking an excessive amount of time to complete one character animation resulting in too many hours to do for each animation). Once I email you the character images in sprite format, you'll see that there isn't much to do, but I do want vertices and bones rigged in places where they should be. Again, the images I'll send to you sometime today will be snapshots from a rough sketch/sculpt I made in ZBrush. I also had someone else from this forum express their interest so let's start out slow with one animation. I'll see which version I like and go from there, but let's take it slow for now. I'll be able to start paying you this coming up Friday, but you'll have a chance to see the images and maybe figure out how to go about cutting up the body parts for animation. Again, they don't have to be exactly perfect and match the sprite keyframes. You can deviate from the walk animation sprite as long as it looks good.

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

I've checked out your LinkedIn profile and clicked on Contact Info, but not seeing your email address anywhere. Anyways, I've decided to upload the images on my Google Drive. The links are below. The first one is for female character and the second one is for the male character. The rigging and animation sprites aren't good, but it's the quickest way to get get a placeholder character in place.

I forgot to tell you how I'd want to pay you and if you accept PayPal, we can do that? As for the character images, feel free to draw on them (like eyes, mouth, etc...) or whatever you want to help you animate them better in Spine.

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

That is correct. I need the body parts cut-up and animated within Spine, however if this will be a difficult, there's no worries. I can try and animate it myself in Spine. The only thing important to me is rigging and animating the walk and run animations. As far as Spine goes, the animation would be smoother and less work, rather than manually drawing the character sprites frame by frame.

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

The two folders I've provided you on my Google Drive are it. They are a very close representation. I haven't yet drawn out the actual characters. Once you cut up the character, rig it and animate, all I have to do in the future is swap out the skins in Spine. I guess you can pretend the images/sprites you saw earlier in my Google Drive are the final character.

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

Below is the URL link to the zip file. This contains two folders: "female" and "male". I only put in the essential animations I want:

idle
walk
run

NateAdmin

No worries. I know it's not going to look visually good, but as long as the animation is okay, I'm fine with it. Pretend you're working with stick figures, but with volume. I'll sort out the placement corrections later.

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

I just wanted to check in and see if you've made any progress? I'm thinking this may be too difficult to do in 8 directions. If you haven't started yet or don't think it's possible, then go ahead and just end it there. I don't want to trouble you too much.

NateAdmin

Hi Tom,

No worries and thank you for your time. I don't want to burden you either, so let's just forget about this work. Have a great rest of the week 🙂