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Mixing frame-by-frame with cut-out animation
(English isn’t my first language, excuse me for any bad grammar)
Hello. I’m developing a Sonic the hedgehog fangame (or romhack, rather), called Mobius Evolution 2, whose first demo shall be getting released in less than 2 months from today for the Sega Genesis/Megadrive.I want to try to do an animated intro before the first level plays. I’m not yet a professional animator, formally I’ve just begun studying the animation career the past year, and there’s a lot I have to learn and practice yet. In fact, I actually doubt getting this intro ready on time, especially considering I’m the project’s chief programmer too, so I want to try some means to save some time, if no one has issue with that…
First of all, consider that even if they are compressed I can’t add too many frames to the ROM, we have no more than 4MBs of storage; if I can save some drawings in walk cycle by moving the character up/down and keeping his feet off-screen, I will. I’d arrange each scene from the storyboard based in priority; I’d try my best to draw the keyframes myself, outsource the in-betweens to whoever willing to help, and if time gets on my heels, I’d animate the rest through cut-out technique, and export the sequences as full frames. I paint the frames, convert them all to the ROM, and reprogram the layer movement sequence by hand. IF there’s time left afterwards, I’d slowly replace the cut-out frames with other new frame-by-frame, still following the priority, then release it with however work I manage to put out in the end.
Is any of this a bad practice or a badly-seen practice? Is the style shift more noticeable than I believe would be? Any tips?
Thank you! -
1 Reply
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Is it correct that you use a cutout, so only a part of certain frames for the animation? If so, I wouldn’t recommend that given your circumstances, because that would mean that you’re practically wasting the memory storage (which is already limited). What you could do would be to animate your sequences in After Effects and then export the animation as a png sequence with heavy compression.
This would safe you a lot of time if you were practically animating the frames in the ROM itself prior, and you might even get smaller files.
Considering that you’re modding (or rom-hacking if that’s a word) an old game, you would easily get away with very low-bit frames, so maybe limiting the color space to a low standard, perhaps even 8 or 16 bit could do you another favor memory-wise.
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