[Starlight] he attac, he idle, but most importantly, he exis (Patreon)

AY HOMIES WHAT UP IF you don't th ink i've slept straight from my last post through to this one then what the fuck are yo u even doing my BUDDY

fortunately thanks to the inventions of a certain choukoukoukyuu inventor sleeping has not stopped me from getting shit done

so anyway i definitely meant to post some in progress shots of this or like after i finished the art or at least after i chopped it up or something but...
well, i didn't.
i had every intention to.
i had every ability to.
i may even have had the time and energy to.
but... well.
didn't.
oops.

anyway look. i redrew karus in a different pose to use as a prospective battle model and test out the viability of this system of animation. here's the idle pose.

i had mentioned i wasn't necessarily a
i forgot what i was typing midsentence.
well, whatever. whatever i mentioned i wasn't necessarily, thr world will never know.

anyway, my focus with drawing this model this time was doing it as quick-and-dirty as i could, not because i'm into that, but because i am going to have to do these for a LOT of enemies and one of my major goals in doing this now was assessing what exactly the time commitment therefrom would be and if it would be practical to continue on like this.

to that end i deliberately skipped several steps i would normally take, such as highlights, which look questionable at small sizes, and coloring lines which i've observed could be troublesome for smooth animations. i also made a personal challenge of not nitpicking the lineart too much because even though i am still learning, i figured it would get sized down so much as to not matter.

so this was wing city, population me.
you can also see there are some outstanding issues like the fact that his hand is in front of his spear-- i am capable of fixing that, but for now i have only cut this model into large pieces to test how it would be to animate an attack. fitting it into the fingers requires pieces (i.e, cutting apart the hands onto separate layers) which i'll do later. but it has not been forgotten, and is not difficult to do. 

soooooo like i said, i'm mainly doing this to test attack animation (and have something to work with while i'm out of the country-- my laptop probably can't manage animation editing well)

so here's a test. very rough draft, but you know, it moves, and for now that's good enough for me. 

from the idle animation this took about 40 minutes. and i'm still learning to use the thing. it is quite efficient after the art phase is done. i look forward to learning how to add visual effects and such. 

so the next step is getting this to work in game properl-- wh? what's that? on the horizon? on the wind? do you hear it? do you taste it? it's-- it's....

it's-- already working in the game..! m-masaka...

there was a little trouble there but not much. found a couple requisites in that i have to export the animation as an older version of the software i'm using to make it rather than the newer version-- i will pray that causes no problems down the line. and that i also have to set an internal name for things... this program is not very well documented and it is even less well-documented in specific tandem with RPG Maker so thank god that one thing happened to be online.

and other than that the attack up there is properly happening on player input and returning to idle. it's in front of UI elements only because i haven't dealt with that schnizz yet.
AND?? somehow RPG Maker has made the animation even more smooth than it is in the actual animation editor? probably due to smooth PIXI scaling but damn if fairy wasn't my favorite type before it would be now
(pixi is an image-handling library included with RMMV. but it sounds cute so i like it.)

so basically we're super in business and i feel reasonably secure that i'll be able to continue with this style of model for the rest of the game.

it also means i cry in understanding that i'll have to make like 100 of these.

worth.