I am the developer of Creature, an exciting new cutting edge 2D animation tool! With Creature, you can add stunningly fluid animation to your digital content. At the core of Creature is a highly advanced skeletal animation, mesh deformation and dynamics system.
This utility allows the export of animation data into MonoGame.
Save Time + Cost with Automated Animation
The main difference between Creature and other animation tools out there is its Directible Automated Animation Engine. What that means is the ability to procedurally generate, through an Automated but User Directible process, complex motion like Walk/Run Cycles, Tail Flopping, Wing Flapping, Cloth Dynamics and Flesh/Muscle response.
Such types of motion are normally very tedious to animate manually. With Creature, such tasks can be done in a much more efficient manner, resulting in huge time and cost savings! Of course the point of Creature is not to take away from animation as an art but to add to it. Hence all automated procedures can be tweaked, directed and in many cases manually adjusted.
I will be more than happy to answer any more questions you have as well as post any animation samples. In addition to that, do note that we are constantly updating and adding features to our MonoGame runtimes so any suggestions/tips will be appreciated.
Probably because the output of the program can be easily used with monogame, and it’s a quite interesting tool. Several other programs generate data which can be used in MonoGame and are mac-only.
Yes I have been getting a lot of people asking for the windows version. The PC port is already underway right now as I type this reply, it should be done in a couple of months.
The tool itself is a native tool but the output it exports is cross platform. I provide full source code runtimes for multiple engines, including MonoGame.
You can take a look about what I am talking about here: http://www.kestrelmoon.com/creaturedocs/Game_Engine_Runtimes_And_Integration/MonoGame_Runtimes.html
Please let me know if you have any questions. Cheers!
how does your tool compare to Blender? Keep in mind with Blender (Opensource for over a decade) with variety of advanced animation tools as well as import and export of capture data?
So far I haven’t seen a tool on the market other than the high end (maya) that can compare to the capabilities.
Blender and Maya are both 3D authoring tools, Creature on the other hand is targeted at the 2D audience.
Of course, you will rightly point out that one can also author 2D meshes with Blender and target a 2D platform. That is true as well.
So to answer your specific question of how it compares with Blender:
Creature rigs are built from the ground up to incorporate procedural dynamics.
This means a physics/motion engine is built in directly to the rigs.
In other words, if you wanted to animate a walk cycle for example, you would install walk motors onto the legs to automate the walking motion. If you wanted to make the tail of your character flop automatically up and down based off the rest of your rig, you install a bend physics motor on the tail and let the system take care of the rest.
The feedback for the animator is instant. As in you don’t have to run a simulation on the rig to get the results; the physics and dynamics solution are fully integrated as part of the animation system.
Obviously the goal of Creature isn’t to replace manual animation. However, it can save an animator/technical artist a lot of time since the automated solution can generate a prototype that is 80% of the way there. From then on, the animator can convert the solution back into regular FK animation knots and manually adjust those values to fit his/her result.