Question about isometric character animating

mszydlik

Hi there,
I'm new here and I have a question about the limits of animating in this program.
I see that this software works very well for side scrolling games. However, would the software be able to work for characters drawn at an isometric camera angle. Like for a game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics or Wakfu?
From this angle a characters limbs can change length dramatically depending on the pose, going toward and away from the camera. Not like a character drawn in profile where the bones are always perpendicular to the camera. Is it possible to animate characters at an isometric angle in Spine?

Thank you for your time!

mszydlik

Mitch

FFT in particular used something very similar to Spine to deal with their animation; it still just took a huge amount of work as all of their sprites were broken up into tiny little pieces with a great many drawn angles for arms, hands, so on, with limited tweening and with the central body generally being a unique frame.

So as long as you're willing to generate a lot of frames, Spine is a great choice for this 🙂 It makes managing your assets a lot easier as attaching/moving stuff is really simple. But just to be clear, animating in iso using 2D assets is nothing like animating a 3D character in ISO. You need to generate a lot of frames.

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mszydlik

Hi Mitch!
Thank you very much for the response. That is very encouraging. So, are you saying it would work similar to flash, where I need to swap art as the characters limbs change perspective? Is that how it would be handled?
Also, I'm confused as to how the bones/joints would be drawn since the character is drawn in a foreshortened way. How does that work? Can you provide any more clarity? Or do you know of anyone who has used this software for characters in isometric games? Or any game not drawn as a profile (side shot) ?

Sincere thanks!!

Mitch

There are a couple of 4-directional games that are starting to look good. They have put a ton of work into dealing with foreshortening and I usually see them do it by scaling bones up and down int he legs when walking "Up" or away from the camera.

On the Unity side of things, I posted 4-way/8-way movement something here on how to control it, but its just a bunch of screen bakes from a 3D model because I don't have the time to build a character like that heh. I'll reach out to some of the folks I know are doing the perspective chars and see if they'd be willing to post some of their progress 🙂

In the mean time you should check out Game Character Hub too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2XNHPnehG0
It's available on Humble Bundle right now for like $10-12 along with a lot of other stuff. They have some really cool iso-handling stuff built in as well as some great character templates to get you started.

My personal feelings toward iso animation is that if you REALLY need to do interpolation its almost better to animate a base character in 3D and bake out some pre-viz then put it in the background of your Spine file... I honestly don't know of a "best" way to animate iso characters with 2D tools. FFT used interpolation on individual parts to do things like make arms bounce up and down during an idle, but not to animate them rotating around the shoulder - they used image swap when that was needed. I would absolutely love to make a "Spine FFT" template at some point 🙂 But it'll be a while heh.

skullkrusher101

I am also wanting to make a game like this. I am willing to draw the necessary sprites, what im wondering is, is there a way to reuse animations across multiple angles?

Mitch

Mirroring works pretty well so you usually only end up having to do North East and South directions for a 4 directional character, or similarly Iso cardinal directions. Down Left and Down Right are generally mirrored.

Take a close look at Ramza's sprite from the FFT images above. The Idle pose has 5 directions but represents 8 possible directions for smooth camera rotation when combat is not happening. The walking/attacking/action animations only have 2 angles, Up Left and Down Left - that is because the game works on a grid and the camera locks itself to an oblique of those angles to allow mirroring of only 2 angles to cover the 4 cardinal directions.