In the previous posts, I’ve described how you can create graphics. This post will be about animating them. There are some game engines available that offer animating solutions, but not all of them. That’s why I’ve been looking for another solution. I’ve found a program called ‘Anime Studio Pro’ which allows you to animate your graphics pretty well

In Anime Studio Pro there are a few different ways to animate. One of them is to have an image of, for example a character, and add different ‘bones’ on top of it. This way you can create a skeleton on top of the image that represents the character. Once you change the skeleton, the program will bend and transform the image to follow the movement.

I do not really like this method, since the bending of the images creates some weird artifacts from time to time. Things in the picture often get bent while they shouldn’t be able to. This gives me the feeling that I’m not 100% in control.

Therefor I’ve decided to use another method. In this method I take the picture of the character and cut it up in pieces that I want to move from one another. I’m practically making a small picture for every movable bone that I’m going to use.

When I go into Anime Studio Pro and add the bones to the character, I’m able to animate it without bending the picture at all. I’m basically moving and rotating a set of different pictures from one another.

Unfortunately, I can’t show a picture of this process since the file got corrupted and I currently don’t have time to recreate the animation. There are a lot of useful tutorials on the internet that can help you with this process though: This one for example.

Once you have a your character all set up and you are able to animate it, you can start creating animations. I noticed that walking animations are pretty hard to make, so I decided to find some reference material. There are a lot of images available on the internet, this one for example:

By using this image as an example, I created a few walk loops. I basically copied the different positions of the body, arms and legs and created a realistic walk loop this way. I exported the loop as a flash file, which can be seen here.