This Dev Blog post covers a couple techniques we are using in Do I Have a Right? to make certain art tasks easier to handle.
Backstory
We knew we'd need a number of animated bodies for the characters in the game (about 10 for the lawyers, plus another couple dozen for the clients). Originally, we discussed creating a system to dynamically shift the color of the bodies on the fly in game, but that seemed difficult to justify given the number of bodies needed. Had we needed hundreds of different bodies we'd almost certainly have opted for a programmatic solution, but a brute force method seemed better scaled to the task at hand.
Even still, recoloring dozens of Movie Clips by hand is not a trivial task. Editing a Flash symbol that is laid out with multiple layers and nested groups and such is fine for one or two symbols, but when it comes to editing large swaths of them one-by-one, I like to set things up at the beginning to be as easy as possible.
Initial Setup
Once Fiona finished the animation cycles, I combined them all into a single Movie Clip one after another (e.g. idle facing SE, idle facing SW, etc). Our animation system is flexible enough to allow for splitting the animations into separate symbols, but knowing that we'd need to change the colors by hand, I decided it would be faster to put them all in the same symbol. I then split Fiona's animations into separate layers; one for all the strokes and one for each fill for each body section: skin, torso, legs, shoes and dress shirt. The idea wasn't to divide the body into regions so much as it was to get each swath of color onto its own, clean layer.
Shadows
Blocks of the main color were darkened and used as shadows. I pulled all those out, made them 20% alpha black and ensured that the original medium color was underneath. This let me change the color underneath without having to figure out a corresponding shadow color. It's not an ideal solution for creating shadow colors in all scenarios, but it works very well when the shadows are simple.
Edit Multiple Frames
This setup allows me to use the Edit Multiple Frames option in Flash to change the color of all frames of a given shape without having to edit each individual frame. Edit Multiple Frames can be a bit mind-bending: it allows you to edit the three dimensions directly visible on the stage (height, width and sorting) as normal while also allowing you to edit across time. So, if you want to change the color of a frame-by-frame, hand-animated shape, you don't need to do each frame one-at-a-time.
- Lock all but the layer you want to edit
- Click the Edit Multiple Frames toggle (where?)
- Click the Modify Onion Markers button and choose Onion All (where?)
- Select all and make your edits!
