Greetings to y'all! We've decided to tell you a bit about our Freaky Awesome working process and the tools we use. Most of them were made in our studio specially for our needs. The tools list is pretty long and generally consists of some minor solutions to optimise the work and make it easier for each team member. So today we're going to tell you about the tool that we use to make animations production easier for us.
That's how animations look in Adobe Photoshop. As you may see, the animations are being drawn frame by frame. We export this animation in separate PNG files. This could take a lot of time if doing it by hand, so we decided to optimize this process.
Adobe Photoshop allows us to make our own scripts for the certain scenarios. We used this feature to create a plugin that can work with particular PSD file or even number of folders. Thus, we can export all our few hundreds of animations with just one click. The plugin parses a file name and, on the basis of it, puts the gotten images and timeline files to certain folders.
As the result, we get a pack of pictures plus description files for each animation that are used later to be imported in Unity3D.
That's when the animation importer comes to the scene. We give it the folder with the resources we got earlier, and it creates animation files within Unity. It can also pack the graphics and set their necessary settings on the go.
We can watch the animation files we got inside Unity and correct the timelines, or even add some events for the certain frames.
A gotten prefab (a game object) is ready to use in project. We just need to put it on the scene. We can also reflect animations vertically or horizontally. Generally, animations can be played in separated stream, so that we can pause only the part of animations within it. Thus, we created the comfy solution on working with animations that perfectly fits to our project and works fast.
We'll read all the comments, and if there'll be some positive reaction, we'll try to make more such posts. See ya! Till the next post!