Moho Animation Forum

Hello. I own/operate a site for browser-based games ... itch.com and we've been thinking about developing a game where we show animated fighting but have some very basic questions about how animations are created using a tool like anime studio...

If we want to have a 2d character animate through 50 different actions (i.e. attacks), then we want to create more characters that look different but have the same "rigging", does this mean the work to define the animations can be re-used?

As an example ... http://karate.itch.com/fight_view.cfm?f ... =661287191 ... we paid an animator to make 15 different actions for this karate guy. But, the animations were made from scratch and although we think they look great, if we now want a Mr.T looking boxer to be added to the game with the same animations, there's really no way to re-use the animation work that was done for the karate guy. This makes it cost-prohibitive to make the game we have in mind which requires 50 different characters and 50 different actions.

At 50 charcaters + 50 actions the cost it's potentially doable. But, at 50x50 cost there's no way we would have the budget to try to tackle it.

I hope/assume that defining the animation sequence and bones in anime studio makes it possible to re-use the animations and if their are limitations like every character would need to be the exact same size then I'd appreciate some thoughts on that.

Also, even if it's a very wide range, if anyone could give what they believe a reasonable price to have a character like the karate guy linked above created with 50 different actions in anime studio and then a guess on incremental character designs using the same animations, I would be very appreciative. I know there's a lot of detail missing but I'm just looking for a wide range to help decide if this project is even in the ballpark for us.

Thanks.

There is always the possibility of reuse of actions if, for example, the animation was performed using the underlying bones system in AS. Then it would mostly be a matter of fitting the new character to this same bone set.

If the characters differed greatly in construction (say one has long pants and another is wearing shorts) there may be some tweaking necessary in both the bones movement as well as the character design itself, but it wouldn't require doing things from scratch.

Also, Vern here has a bones copy script that allows movements to be copied from one bone system to another -- it's far from perfect but if your bone rigs are all set up the same it might work just fine for you.

So, the short answer is you'll have to do *some* amount of tailoring for each character, but it may not be much at all depending on how you set things up.

Yes, rigging is re-usable. It helps if the characters are roughly the same size and proportions. There are plenty of talented people here that could do this for you, I'm sure!

Great. I was pretty sure that would be the case but wanted to know for sure.

I'll post in the jobs section when I have more details and more solid level of commitment to move forward with the project, but I would love to get some kind of cost range so if anyone can throw out a range I'd appreciate it.

Thanks for the info.