Animator Project

October 7, 2011

The weekend after Ludum Dare some of my plans fell through so I decided to work on a simple animation project, a major feature I had to cut from my project.  The project was simply joints and bones with simple interpolation between keyframes.  The editor, or lack of, consisted of 10 key frames and a stick man with 11 joints and 10 bones.

After getting the mouse to drag a joint it was clear I needed to make the editor smart enough to keep the joint dragged within the length of the bone as the bones would be growing/shrinking during the animation and messing stuff up.  After adding the limits, it was starting to act how I wanted; although I had to press digits 0 through 9 quickly to see the animation.

While writing the interpolation from frame X to frame Y I came across a bug where I was accounting for an offset I didn’t need to and it resulted in something surprising but cool; stickman into spaceship.