General Flash Model Sheets (Animation Cels)

[Terrantor!!!]

Decided to start a thread about an important dynamic to flash Animation and that's how your models are composed. What techniques do you use to slice things up to keep your models usable and presentable? I keep mine simple. Take a look and offer criticism. It's hard to hurt my feelings, so do your best.

[Bad Idea]

Not really sure what to say. Your drawing style is very different from mine, as is your strategy for composing the character. It'll probably work fine for an action game or a quick animation where he's just running to the right. I could see talking being an issue, since the art style makes me think the whole jaw will probably animate when his mouth opens, but that just means you need to keyframe the whole head instead of keyframing a mouth floating over the head. If he does anything complex with his hands, you're going to need more of something. Probably alternative hands would look better than fully animated fingers.

Oh, I will say this: good on you for using 3/4th perspective! I don't know why more artists here aren't doing that. You can do everything you can do with straight-up side-view, and more. Facial expressions, especially.

Well, since you showed me yours, I'll show you mine:

DemonDreamsAnimationCels.png (103.99 KiB) Viewed 2314 times

As you can see, I've got a whole lot more moving parts here, as well as some nested parts such as the head and torso. Actually, *all* of the parts you see here are composed of nested movieclips so that I could tint the light and dark colors of each part seperately. The light reds are separate movieclips from the dark reds which are seperate from the outlines. The mouth has different keyframes for different phonemes, and the eyes have a timeline which gradually transitions the pair of eyes from Tareme to Tsurime across 20 frames. Eyebrows are seperate from the rest of the head to allow me to pose them individually during certain couples animations. The hardest part was making sure to always strategically place each body part's registration point, because once you've settled on that, you can't change it without breaking all of your animations. If you plan on rotating or flipping anything via ActionScript, you definitely need that registration point to be centered in a reasonable spot.

I tried not to overuse shines as separate layers, but for the breasts in particular, there's no alternative to separating out the shines and nipple parts if you want them to look tantalizingly 3D in that way Flying Tree Frog pioneered. Shoulders are separate parts because I just needed them to be able to shrug a bit in certain situations. There might be a more graceful way to do this, I don't know. This works pretty well so far. Expect plenty of nasty joint-breaking in certain animations, and questionable positioning of body parts partially hidden behind the torso, etc.

Now, keep in mind that this model layout, my coloring process in Demon Dreams, and the technique of nesting movieclips within movieclips were all designed with AS2's strengths and weaknesses in mind. If you use AS3, you might find that a model laid out like this one might have too many layers for the animation to display at a reasonable frame rate, or be too difficult to work with programmatically, for various reasons. (Alternatively, AS3 brings some really neat stuff to the table such as for... in loops.)

Anyone else want to break down their characters for us?

[Terrantor!!!]

Looking good. thanks, I'll be stealing some inspirations from you. Let me know if you wanna make some hentai. Nothing too interactive just a small movie or something.

[Mattis]

It's often just a matter of "what you want to do".
Depending on the smoothness and epicness of your animation, you might want to cut every little pieces or almost none.
Basically, I advise to keep as few different parts as possible, if you have to do tons of animations with it. (and vice-versa)
If really the animation looks strange, you can still slice new pieces anyway.
For example I often start with foot+calf being only one big limb, but if it looks odd, I keep the calf animation, but slice out the foot from the symbol, into a new one I animate additionnally.

That said, separating eyebrows, mouths, eyes and some hair pieces always come in handy, to animate separately inside a global "head" symbol (or outside, on animation root, if your animation will have a very static head through all of it)
Nesting can be really powerful indeed, but personnally I never found a way to nest boobs or arms into torso part, because... you really just need them to do far too complex moves to nest them, alas.

For limbs connexion, I suggest using the fact limbs are gonna overlay each other to extend some limbs.
For example knees and elbows can often be "hidden" in overlayed parts of upper/lower arms/legs, for them to look as good when straight or bending.
Use the fact the limbs will cover each other to hide additionnal chunks of body, don't just "2D cut" your stuff.
(anyway, usually obvious in the first minutes of trying, lol)

For the 3/4 view, you are quickly very limited, on "multiple characters interactions" (who said "sex" ? Well, I did ^^).
With 2 characters in 3/4 view, it will quickly look odd, aside from spooning poses.
But yeah, it add a powerful visual value, when you can place it
Again, depends on what you plan to do with it!
Always a compromise between the time you will spent animate it and the smoothness of the result.

As example, my slice from KoPC. Which isn't complete and looks crappy as hell, I know, but this price paid allowed me to offered dozens of customs and alternate skins for every single parts, as well as to do a hundred different sex poses, from 1 character to 5 charactes involved.



Basically, I just confirm what already been said, lol, but it just shows there's a logical reason we all end up with that kind of slicing process.

[Terrantor!!!]

@mattis. She's pretty hot. have you used her in any games or anything?

[Clairite]

I've seen this character model quite a bit. KoPC (in Mattis' post) is a game called King of Porn City, and I know another called Sex Pit(?).

[Mattis]

Yep, both KoPC and Sex Pit are from me.
Been running since more than a year, for KoPC, with countless content updates (it's not "one girl", it's just one set of customs to fuel the random generator engine pulling out hundreds of poor girls to use and abuse in the game)
Might want to check it out on mysexgames.com if you miss the adventure, I've tried to push this ragdoll engine to a lot of very creative (and sometimes atrocious) experiments, lol

And I'm cooking another one with the help of a better artist, for my coming big ass hentai MMO project :
(still mega w.i.p. Sorry, can't show you the current state of the game, I keep exclusives for my patreons :p)