Animation Distortion Issue

dmtaft

Hi so I'm trying to animate a whale swimming. The tale moves up and down. However when I create a simple animation sequence in GS, the whale appears to get slightly squished in some frames.

Also the head tends to move up and down (or appear in slightly different places), even though I only want the tail to move. I've tried cropping the image so that all frames are in exactly the same size box. Although I'm thinking that since the whale is in a slightly different place with each identical crop; (tail down then head is relatively higher in crop box or when tail is up head is relatively lower in crop box) then maybe the solution is to crop the whale in a larger box and try to keep the head in the same position in the box. But how can I accurately/easily do that? Also if I have to use a larger crop box, how can I do this smoothly without having to use a large box for the default actor, so I can effectively still have the smallest reasonable hit box.

I also tried downloading Pixen, but I just get a bunch of Pixen folders and I don't know how to install it, any help on that would be great too (since I heard Pixen has an animation module).

UtopianGames

If you actor is too large you can use a mask actor for the collision, lets say your sprite is 128x128 but you want a smaller area for collision simply make another actor (lets say 64x64) and constrain it to the bigger actor and have it contain all the collision rules.

Darren.

dmtaft

That sounds like a good solution for independently controlling the collision area, thanks.