How do I use dragon bones to make animated sprites?

[choco_cherry]

I'm making a visual novel with my friend and we wanted to make animated sprites. We begun looking for options and we particulary liked the idea of making fluid animations with bones and deformation masks. We started peeking into After Effects but recently we found out about Dragon Bones. I tried to look for tutorials as to how to use both together and there's nothing, with AE we achieved to put in the game an animated sprite but we had problems with the transparency... is it possible to use this kind of programs with renpy?

image eileen movie = Movie(play="Prueba_animacion.3gp", mask="Alfa.mov") <-- the code.
show eileen movie:
ypos 204 xpos 55

[pistach]

I used this tutorial to learn it:
https://www.udemy.com/course/free-2d-ga ... ls&src=sac
(I'm not associated with the teacher)

About implementing it in your renpy game, why not just export your animations as png sequences and then use renpy to animate them?
That's what I'm doing anyways.

I've never tried using the the "movie" tag and cannot help you with that.

[choco_cherry]

I used this tutorial to learn it:
https://www.udemy.com/course/free-2d-ga ... ls&src=sac
(I'm not associated with the teacher)

About implementing it in your renpy game, why not just export your animations as png sequences and then use renpy to animate them?
That's what I'm doing anyways.

I've never tried using the the "movie" tag and cannot help you with that.

Thank you for the info! Still, wouldn't it be a little too much frames in a animation like this for example? --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mC9suxK6zM

[Imperf3kt]

Thank you for the info! Still, wouldn't it be a little too much frames in a animation like this for example? --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mC9suxK6zM

The duration of that animation is 2.54 seconds. At 30 frames per second thats 76.2 frames, which is a lot, but nothing Ren'Py cannot handle, unless you're adding several sprites like this. You'd have to test to see where performance starts to take a hit and remember that the people playing your game may not have as powerful a computer as you, or may have an even more powerful computer (part of the reason I do all my work on a crappy laptop)

You could cut back on the frames if you were concerned, but the animation wouldn't be as fluid or you could use movie sprites instead, but those come with the drawback that they can't be used on mobile devices.

[choco_cherry]

Thank you for the info! Still, wouldn't it be a little too much frames in a animation like this for example? --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mC9suxK6zM

The duration of that animation is 2.54 seconds. At 30 frames per second thats 76.2 frames, which is a lot, but nothing Ren'Py cannot handle, unless you're adding several sprites like this. You'd have to test to see where performance starts to take a hit and remember that the people playing your game may not have as powerful a computer as you, or may have an even more powerful computer (part of the reason I do all my work on a crappy laptop)

You could cut back on the frames if you were concerned, but the animation wouldn't be as fluid or you could use movie sprites instead, but those come with the drawback that they can't be used on mobile devices.

Ok!! in the case that I want to use the movie sprites, how do I make them transparent? We had problems with the alpha mask since we don't really know how it works in this cases.
Thanks for the info

[Imperf3kt]

I'm afraid I don't know anything about movie sprites.
Best I can offer is the documentation
https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/movie.ht ... ie-sprites

[choco_cherry]

I'm afraid I don't know anything about movie sprites.
Best I can offer is the documentation
https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/movie.ht ... ie-sprites

Thanks anyway
Already read the documentation, might read it again, maybe I skiped some detail...

[Imperf3kt]

As best I understand it, you need two video files.
One with your movie sprite, one in black and white to be used as the mask. Make sure the contrast is as high as possible, you only want black/white, no grey or in between.

The black areas will be "masked" in your movie sprite and become transparent.
I think.

The actual process involved is called alpha compositing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_compositing

Or more specifically, alpha mapping
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_mapping