Cocos2d support for animation editor - Motion Welder

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Cocos2d support for animation editor - Motion Welder

(19 posts) (14 voices)

Started 1 year ago by JackNg
Latest reply from daojianmahun

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JackNg
Member
Hello everyone. Have you ever heard of Motion Welder.http://www.motionwelder.com/
It is an animation editor target on J2Me development.

If your game have complicate animation, adding animation using CCAnimation may need lots of code and waste lots of time. Using Motion welder has following advantages.
- clean code, only several line of code need
- motion welder handle the anchor point, you will never need to set anchor point any more
- what artist see is what will come out on iPhone, the workflow can be more smooth
- z order is handled by Motion Welder

To create animation on Motion Welder.
- add sprite sheet to Motion Welder
- define clip on the clip tab
- add a new animation and new frame, then drag the clip defined to Animation Windows
- export the animation to .anu format

To play animation from code. (CCMWSprite is the class to read Motion Welder file)
```
NSArray* imageSourceList = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"uggy.png",@"platform.png",nil];
		sprite1 = [[CCMWSprite alloc] initWithMWFile:@"test.anu" withImageList:imageSourceList withAnimationIndex:0];
		sprite1.shouldLoop = true;
		sprite1.scale = 2.0f;
		sprite1.rotation = 30;
		sprite1.position = ccp(240,160);
		sprite1.delegate = self;
		[self addChild:sprite1];
```
Does anyone find this helpful? If someone is interested at the code. I am going to release it.
Posted 1 year ago #
albatross
Member

Sounds interesting, please release ! :)

Posted 1 year ago #
Bongeh
Member

i've spent hours and hours writing co-ordinates for the animations in recent months, this would save alot of time.

Posted 1 year ago #
patrickC
Member

This is VERY interesting!
I didn't know about Motion Welder, the "image clip" feature alone makes it very appealing, we could fit so many more animations in a single spritesheet!

Any code you're willing to share would be highly appreciated, I wonder if the developers have any plans for skeletal animation in the future, that would be just superb.

Thanks!

Posted 1 year ago #
mobilebros
Moderator

This looks very promising!, I see no reason to not release it.

Posted 1 year ago #
JackNg
Member

Good to hear that you are interesting about that.

Actually, motion welder stop development for a long time. However, current functionality is already very handy for complex animation.

I will release a tutorial within next week.

Posted 1 year ago #
David994A
Member

This looks very helpful! Does the Motion Welder application fun on Windows only or does it also run on Mac OSX?

Posted 1 year ago #
finder39
Member

i am going to try it out for my new game, this looks so cool! :)

Posted 1 year ago #
riq
Key Master

I've not used Motion Welder yet, but the more editors that are supported, the better :)

Posted 1 year ago #
brendang
Member

Very very interested! I too have spent nearly a month animating by coordinate. My programmer partner would start each day asking how it was going...all I could think of is... I'm in hell....I'm in hell. He thought it was funny.

Really look forward to this. Run Jack...run!

B.

Posted 1 year ago #
robodude666
Member
Motion Welder is Windows-only, which is funny as it's based on Java and is developed to be used with Java games.

Someone has to make a sprite animation editor that's OS X Native :D.

I don't know what Cocos2D's Sprite Animation stuff is capable of as I haven't used it but I think the following would be helpful to have (if we already can do this, then great!)

An animation class that can eat a plist exported by zwoptex and spits out a CCSprite. You can then setup different animations, like:
```
CCAnimatedSprite *aniSprite = [CCAnimatedSprite spriteWithFrameList:@"blob.plist"];
[aniSprite addNewAnimationWithName:@"Walking" frames:[[NSMutableArray alloc] arrayWithObjects:1,2,3,4,nil] updateRate:1.0f/4.0f];
[aniSprite addNewAnimationWithName:@"Running" frames:[[NSMutableArray alloc] arrayWithObjects:5,6,7,8,nil] updateRate:1.0f/4.0f];
[aniSprite setAnimation:@"Walking"];
```
(That's actually wrong, as "5" is not an object, but you get my drift...)

So you create a new animated sprite w/ a list of all frames. Then you can create a named animation using only specific frames, finally, you can set that the frame will change ever 1/4th of a second (as there are only 4 frames in the animation). You can have additional properties like # of loops, where -1 would be loop forever.

Cheers,
-robodude666
Posted 1 year ago #
JackNg
Member

Seems so many people are interested. I decide to finish the post earlier. Here it is.
http://paperplanestudiodevelopment.blogspot.com/

A sample project is also included at the end of the post.

robodude666: A native OS X animation editor would be a great idea. Hope someone got time to make one and shared with us. However, if you got windows, Motion Welder can already save you lots of time.
An animation class called CCAnimatedClass is also included in the project. It load animation definition from a .plist and use plist exported by zwoptex as source.
Actually, Motion Welder can import clip coordinate. I am contacting developer of zwoptex asking if he can add a functionality to export thw clip file Motion Welder can read.
Stay tune.

Cocos2d support for animation editor - Motion Welder

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