How do I use keyframes and timelines to do proper 'frame by frame' animation
What I'm trying to do isn't really described by any of the existing topics, and it may not even be possible (something not possible in Dreams? Surely not!)
I've got a bunch of sprites that I've done Dreams versions of - these are old sprites from old videogames that I've (hopefully) faithfully replicated in Dreams as shapes (possibly a bad idea because they REALLY fill your graphics thermo up alarmingly!)
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I have around 6 different sprites for a character's animation cycle, all the same dimensons, designed to 'swap' as the character is animated.
I've tried everything using Keyframes and Timelines and the main issues I'm having are these:
1) Keyframes are a bag of poo. They don't really work in the way that they do in something like Flash, as they always insist on a change to the scene. What I'm essentially doing is removing one sprite and replacing it with another - and any method I use to do this (actually physically moving the sprite, making it invisible etc) just causes the damned thing to revert every time I move between keyframes.
2) You can't use "Keep Changes" because it just overlays one sprite over the other until you end up with an unholy mess
3) I can't really use paintings instead of a solid model here (I know a few folk have done some great animated paintings) - I need this character to be movable and playable
4) I feel like I'm missing a trick that should be utterly obvious but I can't for the life of me figure out what to do without going absolutely crazy with logic (I've seen a couple of YouTube tutorials that ALMOST come close to what I'm attempting but they just look ludicrously overcooked).
Anyone else doing anything like this and can point me in the right direction? All I really want to do is create an object that transitions between six 'states' of animation (to replicate a pixel character running). I'm beginning to think I might have to somehow rig this to a puppet but that looks even more complex.
Any help gratefully recieved!
Peej
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Keyframes are amazing! You take that back! XD
Make the keyframe wider so it lasts for the time you want it to be active. So for example, your setup could be to turn all the "frames" off. Then have a keyframe to turn a frame on and use that in the timeline. Scale it up using up on the dpad or zoom in and drag the right or left edge. Make it the length of time you want that frame to be shown. While the playhead is over that keyframe, that keyframe will be active and its frame will be shown. While the playhead is not over that keyframe, that keyframe will not be active.
Perhaps that's already what you have, and it wasn't clear from the post. But this setup should work perfectly well. -
I did a similar kind of thing if you look in my remixable collection to animate a head, I didn’t use key frames I just used a selector to cycle through the different versions of the head turning them on when selected, don’t know if that will help or not, but worth checking out :)
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Okay, I did a lot more fiddling with this last night - largely thanks to this YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag1Z-0qKLwA
About 20 mins in there's a bit where the guy builds a series of 2D sprites and uses keyframes (which, yes, you're right, I should flipping well love a lot more) and a timeline. The key bit I was completely missing here was visibility and invisibility, so I ended up doing the following, which worked for me
1) Create each model of the frames of animation (in my case, it was 4 "sprites" of a flamingo flapping its wings)
2) Switch on 'turn off invisiblity preview' in the guides menu. This is important, because you'll be using invisibility / visibility to control what gets shown in each keyframe
3) Once that's done, make all but the first 'frame' of your animation (your first object) invisible.
4) Drop in your first keyframe, then instantly 'stop recording' - that'll preserve the 1st position state of all your objects
5) Clone that first keyframe on your timeline, then make your first frame object invisible, your second visible then click 'stop recording'
6) Do this as many times as you need to for the remaining frames / objects in turn - When you preview it, what you should see is all your frame objects blinking on then off in turn - ANIMATION! YAY!
7) This bit's important if you want to move that object at any point. Group all your frame objects together (whether they're visible or invisible).
8) Scope into that group, and lay all your frame objects on top of each other so that they overlay (this can be quite tricky unless you have something in your object as a common frame of reference - I was lucky in mine that the 'head' position of the sprite doesn't alter for all frames of the animation, so I just used that as the 'guide' to accurately place them so they all line up - you could of course just use a frame or the grid to do the same - in fact I'd strongly recommend use of the grid!)
9) Last but not least, and this bit's pretty important - rewind your creation then preview it (remembering to rewind it again once you come out of preview mode). Et voila, you should have a proper 'frame by frame' animation in a 2D stylee!
Have a look at my "Flapping Flamingo" creation to see the result, and the very very simple logic I used. I'm now looking at making that flamingo flap across a set path on the screen before stopping, turning around then flapping the other way (I initially thought I could do this very simply but got some very odd results trying to do this as a simple tween animation so might have to think again). Showing and hiding objects is a great idea though, would never have thought of that as an approach! -
Oh and cheers Supposer / Amenjo1 for some good suggestions below, will have a look at your creations and see what you did too! Always a better way. I absolutely love Dreams, it's robbed me of being interested in any of my other PS4 games at the moment :)
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