Thoughts on workflow of non-scripted animated scenes [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 11 years ago.

Improve this question

I've been asked to look into developing a children's book adaptation for iPad, the likes of which there are many on the App Store. It sounds like a really nice project, but my previous iOS projects have been of a more 'static' kind, drawing views, scrolling, zooming, tables, etc. and I'm having trouble coming up with how to do this new app.

I have made the transition to Objectiv开发者_如何学Ce-C from Flash, and many of the concepts in Flash have proven to have iOS equivalents, which made the transition pretty smooth sofar. With the task of creating many hand-animated scenes accompanied by interactive animations however, I can't figure out what the right workflow would look like for iOS. In Flash this is a breeze due to the integrated timeline/keyframe animation tools.

Of course I know there are lots of options to look into, but I'm not confident about the techniques I can come up with myself:

1. Fully scripted animation - this is fine for simple object-level animations, but if you need the finesse of a hand animated scene, writing everything in code is insane.
2. Quicktime movies - a movie can be the result of any animation environment (Flash, After Effects, 3D rendering, etc) so your animation can be anything. Though that's nice, the down sides are a huge increase in file size, great limitations to interactivity and if you combine multiple movies, a very negative impact on performance.
3. Texture atlases - (see this article) though a great technique to use for flexible animations, I assume using this on iOS will restrict you to use a very small set of frames limiting the complexity of the animations, or very small animations, limiting the visual size of the characters.

Who knows what workflows teams use to create the animations in apps/games like Happy Tree Friends: Slap Happy (Video, don't mind the commentary) or the alien/frog in Cut the Rope (iTunes)? Are there any tools or libraries that speed going back and forth between XCode and possible third party software? And a final blasphemic question: would there be a tool to import animation sequences from Adobe's Flash as Cocoa objects that you can then code with? (note: it has been done in JS)

Cheers,

EP.

Similar questions with no answers

• iphone/ipad: how to incorporate flash animation in objective-c?