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Juice FX

Add animations to your images to make them juicy!. · By CodeManu

Feedback / Suggestions

A topic by Thomas Feichtmeir "Cyangmou" created Mar 20, 2019 Views: 709 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 7
(+1)

I am coming from a traditional animation background. I think the program could with some small adjustments be very useful to quickly iterate on bases for sprites which you later touch up in hand animation.


1.) Sliders in Wobble can't be slided back to 0 manually - just to 0.01 / -0.01 - very annoying

/ middle mouse button does this, but only found out after asking. This would need to be communicated to the user somehow.

/Also only found out about rightclicking and adding a value after asking. This would need to be communicated to the user somehow.

I would incorporate this directly in the guy and have a checkbox where you can fill in the value and little arrows to increase/decrease it by the smallest step.

e.g.:


2.) FPS setting

Fps are locked to steps of five.

Usually traditional animators work with 8, 12, 16, 20 or 24 frames per loop. Since the fps number can't be adjusted to those specifics it's not really useful to use JuiceFX as a tool for speeding up animation preparation

3.) Sinus

I think one of the msot powerful additions to the program would be a sinus movement (which moves each horizontal or vertical line of the sprite according to a sinus pattern).

If the sinus can be adjusted towards a different strangth at one end, ffects like mirrorings in water or heatwaves could be easily produced with JuiceFX.

That being said if this would fit o the 4,8,12,16,20,24 fps this effect would be even more useful.

4) Turnarounds.

With setting the horizontal wobble to 0.95 (wondering why it doesn't work with 1) something which looks awfully a lot like a turnaround (e.g. for a coin) is the outcome. his effect could be very useful, however there is no way to manipulate the maximal width of the sprite, so at the moment this is to wide.

Since the tech is thare and in this case it only would need to be resized in 50% in terms of width this would be a powerful new function
This shows the outcome with Wobble Horizontal to 0.95 (its twice to wide)



Thhat's all the feedback I got so far.

The program so far seems to be very useful to quickly animate a graphic just with the presets out of the box, but I think there is a lot of unused potential.

Developer(+1)

Hi Thomas! Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, I'll try to do my best to cover every point.


1.) Sliders in Wobble can't be slided back to 0 manually - just to 0.01 / -0.01 - very annoying

As you said, you can already do this with middle and right mouse click, but you are right that It's only mentioned in the patch notes, we should make it more clear somewhere. Adding the small box with the arrows might be tricky, as there's no much space and a tiny box like in the example you send wouldn't work, as some values are triple digits. We will consider it and see what can be done though.


2.) FPS setting

As a non-animator I didn't think about this, and it can be easily done, thanks!


3.) Sinus

I'm not 100% sure, but isn't this the "Wave" function in the "Timed" tab?


4) Turnarounds.
This is something that has been in the roadmap from the beginning but other things were prioritized, it should come out soon :)


And I think that's all, thanks again for the support and have a nice day :)

(2 edits)

Thanks for taking the time to raply.


Regarding 3 let me specify it.

I also added an example and the advantages of a sinus movement down below.


You achieve a wave via horizontal and vertical transformation, which leads to waves on a very high pulse frequency, but on very low pulse rather draws a visible grid on the sprite.

This doesn't really matter for HD sprites, because they easily can loose horizontal or vertical lines, but for pixelart you need a clean and simple wave solution.

Also the main direction of the wave you implemented is at 45° if both transformations are of equal strength.

You can go towards something like 20° but never towards a pure horizontal or vertical wave direction.

The specifics of the sinus is that the height (or if 90° rotated) the width of the sprites stays constant. This means the movement rather are sliding lines in one direction.


Advantages of a sinus:

-The direction of the wave is aligned at the main cardinal axis, which makes it much more powerful for small sprites and generally more useful for pixelart. WIth this movement you won't "loose" any pixels due to transformation, resulting in a quiet looking image.

-If the sinus can go towards zero you easily can fake reflections or heatwaves for backgrounds.

-Sinus patterns can be easily made as a constant loop with easily understandable math. This makes it the most powerful movement as an animator if you need a constantly looping element.

-Also if you apply both - a horizontal and vertical sinus add once to a piece of texture, you can create seamlessly looping texture pieces, if the frequency of both waves is the same and the base texture is a tile.

Developer

Hi again Thomas, and sorry for the late reply.

It seems silly now that I understand what you meant, I never thought about giving direction to the waves when I was implementing them but sounds like a natural addition, I've added this to the roadmap and I'll add it to the app as soon as I can. It might take a bit of time, as I'll have to change the way it works now, without breaking old save files, but it will come. :)

no it's not about giving a direction to the waves,

it's about the way the tranformation works.

Even if you would rotate the direction of the wave (you have squash&stretch) you will loose pixels.

Sinus works fundamentally different.

Developer

I didn't mean direction in the traditional degrees meaning, I was talking about horizontal and vertical direction of the waves (plus decay). 

I'd like to throw a few more on the list, since we're on the topic (literally).

1) Currently when the window is resized, the sprite is resized in the preview window, leading to a Preview Scale of 1 not actually being a 1:1 relationship the moment the window is resized.

2) A more granular option to control what tints or otherwise shift from palette A to palette B would be nice.

3) *Bug* When I simulate an animation that involves breaking, the simulation temporarily changes to Preview Scale 1 (but the slider/value does not change), regardless of my currently set Preview Scale. At simulation end it reverts.

4) What exactly does the reverse toggle at the bottom of the Simulate/Render section do? It doesn't appear to do either of the things I was expecting (reversing the animation or reversing the layer)

5) An option to make a layer orbit around center with a radius, speed, and inclination and/or major/minor axes would create a lot of new options very fast.

6) Blur is nice but it appears to shrink the sprite rather than spreading it as seen on the test sprite included, and it would be helpful to have some sort of method to decide the level of blur.

I'm having a lot of fun with the tool myself so far and have had some good uses out of it already. Cheers!

Developer

Hi BoThompson!

Let me go point by point:

1) Currently when the window is resized, the sprite is resized in the preview window, leading to a Preview Scale of 1 not actually being a 1:1 relationship the moment the window is resized.

- This happens due to the resize only resizing the drawing surface, a proper resize method is planned but it will take some time as some missing features and bugs have higher priority.

2) A more granular option to control what tints or otherwise shift from palette A to palette B would be nice.

- Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant with this. :(

3) *Bug* When I simulate an animation that involves breaking, the simulation temporarily changes to Preview Scale 1 (but the slider/value does not change), regardless of my currently set Preview Scale. At simulation end it reverts.

- Preview Scale works fine for me along with Break function, maybe you are doing it on HD mode? HD mode currently has a bug that makes that happen.

4) What exactly does the reverse toggle at the bottom of the Simulate/Render section do? It doesn't appear to do either of the things I was expecting (reversing the animation or reversing the layer)

- It does reverse the animation, but only when the animation is rendered.

5) An option to make a layer orbit around center with a radius, speed, and inclination and/or major/minor axes would create a lot of new options very fast.

- Not a bad idea, added to the roadmap. :)

6) Blur is nice but it appears to shrink the sprite rather than spreading it as seen on the test sprite included, and it would be helpful to have some sort of method to decide the level of blur.

- Blur was a quick addition when releasing the v1.0 version, it should had more control but other features took priority by then, a rework of the blur fx, along with more fx are planned too.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hi CodeManu

can i make a game with juice fx?