Hey!!!!
We’ve been working on some pretty intense stuff for the past fews months, and it seemed like good time to explain what we have been doing.
One of the drawbacks of the old Grafighters was that no matter how cool your character, they had to be sliced in pieces in order to animate. This was terribly tedious to do, and often resulted in ugly breaking points on the limbs. It also set a rigid standard for the types of characters that could be animated reasonably.
To fix this, we have created a way for characters to be animated without being chopped into parts. By converting the character into 2D geometry and applying skin weighting algorithms, we are able to achieve an amazing quality increase in the way the animations look. This is a huge technological step for us, and is really the foundation we have always been looking for. We are really pumped for what we can do now and the future possibilities.
Here is what this means for you:
- Super quick upload process – no more cutting up characters, just place joints and go!
- Better quality animation – Less paper robot looking, more classic cartoon looking. Squashing and stretching, physical material emulation, adjustable movement behavior etc
- More character flexibility (in the future) – Think kirby, blobs, tails, wings, custom skeletons etc
Behind the scenes – a voxel based heatmap for the paper influence for the lower left foot.
More to come soon!
SIDE NOTE: for the people who like the paper-doll style animation, dont worry!! You will be able to create grafighters from parts using the Grafighter machine, so its really the best of both worlds. Seperate blog post on that coming soon.
