its aliiiiiiive (Patreon)

LOOK AT HIM. he DOES STUFF. and i can make him DO STUFF in RPG Maker too! so i'll be putting this together for the message system next but this was just an experiment + learning the program + how to layer models and such

tbh it's not very hard to separate the layer like this since the base art i made was a good enough quality to handle it well, just takes a bit of time. as for the animations themselves-- actually super easy. once the model is armed (as in-- constructed in an armature) it really doesn't take long at all, just a handful of minutes.
(will take fewer minutes once i figure out how to automatically make the first frame a key frame -.- )

 this 2d animation stuff is pretty darn jank imo and i am soooo hype advantages:

• expressiveness! 
• not only that but tween-frame expressiveness to be cool!
• saves me a ton of work potentially redrawing different poses or expressions for the portrait anyway
• i can bend individual parts of the pieces too-- you can kinda see the hair bend when he looks down, meaning i can easily do like wind-blowing type stuff
• super easy idle blinking + talking motions (have to draw an open mouth tho still oops)
• I CAN DO SO M UCH STUFF with this

disadvantages:

• ??????????????? a little extra work to separate layers properly but that's still less than redrawing other emotions entirely. 
• maybe takes more effort to write a script handler and teach it how to handle all the different motions per character... but that's really not that difficult since i already have it going during battles!
• none????? maybe none??????? can we see none??????????
• i know it's naive but let me go with none until proven guilty.

it's also super practical to do idle poses that might have the speaker's hair billowing in the wind or like bopping side to side slightly like FE Fates' Live2d does. It's kinda fun and does make the game screen more dynamic but i've always found it a little weird/unnatural, personally. So right now I'm just planning to make the message idle animations a blink cycle.

The same also like in games with FE-style battlers where they have that bouncey idle pose. So I have to decide that when I make our battlers too. Do you guys like bouncey or static idle poses? Or I guess, wind-blowing-through-hair type ones as a middle ground
but then that's werid inside
eh.

--

we were definitely going to have a spriting stream today and i was all hype for it
and then i got home from a concert a couple nights ago and then got slammed same-night with a fever and lost my voice. so past two days i've kinda been dead. still kind of am dead tbh. have gotten somewhat lightheaded just writing this post.... sooo uh. oops. no need to worry, i'm on the upswing. i uh... really hope, and can talk a little now, but i'll wait on doing the stream for a few days yet.