flipX = true clip with tweens messes up animation

#1

I’ve noticed using flipX or scaleX of -1 on a parent object really messes up any child objects that have tweens.
I have a character with a simple walk animation (with legs, arms, body and head animated in different layers) but when it’s flipped it looks terrible, the rotations are completely messed up. My character’s start moonwalking…

I’ve noticed in my brief foray that wickeditor has a problem properly representing complex nested transforms with scaling and rotation.

Is there any way to get around this?
I’ve tried the new alpha version, it lacks too many features from the original.

#2

I haven’t done much with Wick in terms of animating
because I’m using it for game development,
but maybe a way around could be for you to export your animation
as a gif, then import it back into Wick and flip the individual frames?

I say this with the assumption that all you want is for your
animation’s images to be flipped around.

#3

It’s such a shame that it struggles with nested transforms. I looked at the source code and I was amazed to see it doesn’t use a system of matrices, but an ersatz-system where it calculates a ‘global’ rotation and scale by traversing each parent and combining these values, it doesn’t appear to consider skewing, and produces something quite inaccurate.

#4

Hi @Tom_Wilson,

We’re working through all of these issues in the alpha editor so that nested transforms aren’t an issue. There were quite a few underlying problems with the architecture of the old system, so we are replacing it wholesale.

What features are currently missing that make it unusable for you? We do have quite a few additions coming within the next week or so, and plan on having full feature parity by the end of May!

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#5

A few features off the top of my head that I’d appreciate:

  • the ability to copy paste multiple keyframes across multiple layers. Undoubtedly a fairly tricky thing to implement, but would make animation a whole lot easier.
  • The ability to stretch tweens by holding a command key and dragging the edges of the tween.
  • Timeline zoom in and out.
  • Mousewheel zoom in the editor.
  • a quicker way to access code blocks. In Flash you can view each frame with code in a list, click on one to focus on the object and edit the code.
  • Reusable clip assets (with nesting) - allow a clip to become an asset, so it can be instanced multiple times without duplicating the data. Like symbols in Flash.
    • a function to instance a clip asset in code (different to clone).
  • controllable pivot points for rotation and scaling.
  • Tinting.
#6

Hi tom!

The good news is that the new engine is using a proper system with matrices that are multiplied together to get a final result, so it should feel a lot better and have less weird edge cases than the current implementation. It also supports skewing which is cool!

Full disclosure - when I first wrote the child-parent transformation system in the Live editor I reeeeeeally had no idea what I was doing :grimacing: - I’m surprised it works at all!!

As for your other requests, we’re trying to get most of those features in, except for a Flash-style list of all objects with code on them; we will need to do some design work for that one.

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