Hey gang, happy twenties.
Little bit of a general cg/animation thingy I’m about to bring up, dumping it on offtopic as it’s kinda random. I was trying to wrap my head around gpu skinning when I said screw this, I’ll just have nodes swap meshes every other frame and call it a day.
Obviously I’m a man of class so it’s got to be cheap to the maximum: six or five poses at ten frames per second, no interpolation, that’s enough for walking, running, idling, as well as most other loops. A bit choppy sure, but there’s magic in playing a bunch of images in succession, like a flip book or whatever those thingies whose pages you flip through are called.
Maybe I’m crazy, I mean I totally am, but I couldn’t stop thinking that being able to tell it’s a trick makes me appreciate the illusion of motion a lot more. Not going to declare war on fluid animation and generating in-betweens or what have you, but maan. With everything modern hardware is capable of I find myself looking through the pain-in-the-arse techniques of yore. It’s not even nostalgia, it’s legit charm.
Think about it – swapping one image for another, that’s what happens under the hood right? That’s how I was taught anyway; clear the screen, make a bunch of draw calls, swap buffers, rinse and repeat. It’s like the primordial mechanic of animation or something, I dunno I’ve been drinking a lot and there’s a couple slices shy of three pizzas in me right now.
What I’m trying to get at here is even though I came to this solution as a product of my own laziness and zero shame in admitting to that by the way, I wound up liking this style way more than a more modern skeletal animation system with an eff-a-thon of joints and transform matrices and calculating deformation in-between poses on a per vertex basis and dear God why is math so sexy.
Also there’s no message or punchline I just felt like writting.
Have a nice year, you beautiful basterds.