Animations again and again

Today a slightly different topic. It will be about the problems we encountered and what we are doing to solve them.
As you already know, we are working on improving the animation at Tavern Ventures.
Unfortunately, things do not always go as we would like them to…



At first, we created animations in Moho and Adobe After Effects - tools that offer extensive editing and customization of character movement (Moho and Adobe After Effects are popular 2D animation programs used in both - film and game production).
We later decided to switch to Rive because it provided better control over the interactivity of the animation thanks to its state machine system (the state machine in Rive allows you to create dynamic animations that respond to user interactions, which is particularly useful in games and interactive applications). Unfortunately, Rive has a relatively limited set of animation tools, which became a challenge for us.



We tried to work around these limits by using pre-prepared animations in the form of image sequences (PNG sequence), but the files turned out to be too large, resulting in long loading times and unacceptable performance. (PNG sequences are often used, but many high-resolution images can put a significant strain on the application's memory and loading time.) Therefore, we decided to fully redesign the animations in Rive to better match the tool's capabilities.

However, after a lot of experiments, analysis, and code work, we were able to develop a solution that allows us to combine animations created in other programs with Rive smoothly. This allows us to use more powerful animation tools and then export the effects to Rive in an optimized form. This will greatly speed up our workflow and allow us to create high-quality animations faster.

What will come out of this solution? You will find out in one of the next updates on our progress.
See you there!