To take that work a step further while continuing to avoid that deep dive into modeling and clothing figures, I present a labor-cheap alternative that I call a Bobble-head. I doubt this is original, I think I might have seen Terry Gilliam do something like this at some point.

I had a friend take a snapshot of me from 5 angles that I need to show my ffilmation character from an angle roughly matching that of the game. To get the angle I sat down on the floor. Flat lighting is essential to avoid weird shadows or color effects. You will save a lot of time on silhouetting backgrounds if you can find a solid color background or hang a blanket behind the subject. An office conference room is a good place.

I transformed the silhouetted head shapes so that it looked like each one fit on Ryan’s body at a given angle. To do this I put each angle of Ryan standing in a layer in Fireworks. Then I imported the head bitmaps into a copy of the .fla file containing Ryan, which I had already finished and tested.

A quick test using the script in this post on the .fla showed that I had some more work to do to make the head look natural. It just floated around like a stationary object pasted on Ryan.

Some tweening and testing for each angle made a convincing connection between the two images while maintaining a certain amount of artificiality to the whole thing. Most of the tweens in the mirror angles of the character could be reused by pasting them in and flipping them horizontally. Plan on spending some time on this part, although not as much as you might if you have a learning curve to climb with Poser.

Final Build

OK, maybe BART is not a catchy acronym but is better than when I started (Bulk replaced Wholesale, Full).

When you move an asset into a folder that contains another asset with the same name in Flash Library it will prompt if you want to replace it? If we carefully name all our assets we can use this feature to great advantage when importing assets to build each angle of our character.

The key is to organize assets into folders that ID the angle in their name, but only name the sequence files with the pose and sequence number. For example, the folder ryanRunLoop_90 contains runLoop_0001.png through runLoop_0015.png.

If I want to make a ryan_135 MovieClip from a copy of ryan_90 I can do this by importing the assets and dropping the appropriate bitmaps into their respective folders. For runLoop I would drop the imported bitmaps into char_runLoop_90, choose to replace existing, and rename the folder char_runLoop_135.

To save time, I installed a jsfl Command extension called Find and Replace that will automatically change library names. Unfortunately it doesn’t change folder names.

Create two files for creating your character: an asset .fla to contain all the clips that make up a complete character, and a conversion .fla where you replace assets. This will make creating each angle timeline easier and make any mistakes more obvious when they occur and less costly to fix once detected.

Keep assets for a particular angle in library folders that contain the angle as part of their name. Rename the folders before you copy the finished angle clip from the conversion stage fla and paste it in the asset fla to avoid copying over existing assets for another angle.

Once I had the character angles for 0, 45, 90, 135 and 315 I planned to flip 0, 45 and 90 (the mirror angles) to make 180, 225 and 270.

Gotcha: In order for ffilmation to access the angles at runtime you must make a link for each one. Flipping the mirror angle characters, even if they are duplicates of the mirror angles with the correct linkage names, will not work. You will see the character in your game just as it appears in the library, not on your character .fla stage.

To make movieclips with linkage names for every angle you will have to flip the bitmaps inside a copy of the Movieclip. I use the Edit Multiple Frames tool to select every frame and flip all bitmaps in a single operation. It only takes a few seconds and cuts down on your file size compared to Poncho, which has bitmaps for all angles. You will get the added benefit that any bitmap replaced for a mirrored clip will be also be replaced in its mirror.

Gotcha: Resist the urge to crop! After I saw first render sequence from Poser I realized that each image was the size of the render window, even though most of that area is transparent. So I batch cropped them. After which I noticed the file sizes increased, and I had to hand-register each frame because the cropping algorithm I used made the smallest possible image.

You will notice that every frame you export from Poser will be pin-registered automatically as long as you keep your character in one place and make variations from a copy of the original, standing character. When you replace the bitmaps to create each angle you don’t have to fiddle with their coordinates. Sweet!

[DDET How to filter mouse events to visible areas of png, allow for overlaps]

Use a mask over the standing pose to limit the clickable area to the visible portion of the character. Either a rectangle or a copy of the image will work, depending on how precise you want to be.