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  • What is the best way to handle a character that rotates?

So i'm working on a character for one of the kind gents who contacted me from the networking section here and we've run into a little bit of a conundrum. For this project he wants his characters to be viewable from the top down with an angle (like old chrono trigger, etc). For this i've done 5 angles of the character (front/back/backleft/frontleft/left) and will mirror for the right side.

Now the question is how is the best way to proceed from here. Should I attempt a skeleton that would use skins to swap between parts as it rotates or is it better to make 5 skeletons and keep them separate?

The animations will require body parts from various angles but i'm a little nervous having the skin folder for each bone end up with something like 8 images PER CHARACTER and there should be 5-6 characters. 40+images per bone feels like this isn't the correct way to tackle this problem.

I'm hoping somebody has tackled a problem like this and has some insight! It's a dewsy.

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It is likely cleaner to have a skeleton for each direction. I believe this is what a few other people do. You won't have animation mixing between directions, but you can use an transition animation before switching to showing a new direction. That probably is not even be needed though. I would suggest doing the minimum to get it working at runtime to validate your workflow before you go nuts creating tons of animations and assets.