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Old School Video Game Animation
Hi,
This is my first time posting here, though I’ve been reading for quite a while. I’m in a motion graphics class at school and its proving to be very difficult for me– though I love motion graphics. I’m very envious of those who have full command of After Effects. Regardless, I need to do a project and I’ve been trying to do this simple sprite animation and it’s much harder than I expected.
Basically, I have a psd that has all of my illustrations. For example, I have a man riding a bike, and there are two instances (right leg up, right leg down). I imported this into flash, and made a simple animation (almost like an animated gif) to make it appear like he’s riding the bike. I then imported this into after effects to add to a greater scene but it doesn’t animate! I don’t know what to do since the man riding a bike is one of many things I need to animate. This ostensibly could all be done in flash with a series of movie clips but I want better control of the audio and to be able to use the camera. If you think I should just stick to flash let me know, though I’ve seen examples of this done in after effects, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaIMD6Crh_I
Here’s a link for another example of the style of old school “sprite” animation that this is emulating –––––––––> https://www.vimeo.com/1907410
Any help would be much appreciated!
Thank you!
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4 Replies
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Without a little ore info, I can’t be sure of your problem, but this is a safe guess:
Before you output a swf file, treat your symbol instances as “graphics,” not “movie clips.”
If you can’t see the animation inside of Flash before export, it won’t appear in AE either.
The Flash Player can read movie clip instances and display them properly, but Flash, AE, Quicktime, etc. will not.Import this swf file into AE and you should be good.
If this doesn’t solve your problem, let me know a little more about your workflow and I’ll see if I can help.
I have made a few animations in AE using swf files for character animation mixed with 3D camera moves and other compositing tricks. It is possible. -
im not a flash guy so forgive me here. Im not sure why you would even use flash to do this. A bunch of stills and precompps will do 99% of what you want. If your not aware of precomps and things like that in after effects, you might need to read up a bit.
SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects -
It’s very advantageous to use Flash for character animation to be imported into AE.
When you import an animated swf into AE and check the “continuously rasterize” switch, it maintains its vector properties. Thus, you can scale it up all you want. It also remains linked to that one generally very small swf file that can be re-exported and auto-update at any time if you need to tweak the animation. Because of Flash’s drawing and animation tools, it is a very good medium for creating character animation effectively and quickly in ways AE, Photoshop, or Illustrator can’t compare. Flash will also automatically generate an alpha channel when you export an animated swf.This is the approach the team that made the shorts for the Heavenly Sword videogame used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMI8nbxukK4 -
Thanks so much for recommending precomps! After messing around with precomps and scouring other message boards I found my solution. I wound up taking the precomp, getting what I wanted out of it and then enabling Time Mapping, and looping it with expressions most notably –––> loopOut(type = “cycle”, numKeyframes = 0)
Here’s the thread that really sealed the deal for me: https://mograph.net/board/index.php?showtopic=5375
Thanks again!
Also, the Flash solution worked but I found that it was hard to keep the quality very high. It definitely is one way to do it though.
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