[WIP] Dragon's Lair II Time Warp: Amiga Intro Animation

[Hache]

Hi! Motivated by winning 1st place in animation category in the Amiga Art Contest 2021, I started working on the Dragons Lair II Time Warp intro in Personal Paint. The idea is to remake the complete intro (at 32 colors per shot) so it can be reproduced on an Amiga. My achievement would be to do justice and give to Amiga this Dragon's Lair II intro that never had.

For this I propose 3 kind of goals:
Low: This will remain as a simple animation to play in an Amiga software such as Personal Paint, etc (without audio).
Medium: Be able to be reproduced as a Stand-Alone Demo (in this case I would need a coder and an Audio Designer)
High: WHDLoad version of this intro in order to be played before the original game (or as stand alone WHDLoad Intro)

I will be posting progress in this same thread.

You can watch the first shot (rough) here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11Oq...ew?usp=sharing

Cheers and Amiga forever!

[turrican3]

It's a really good project !

good luck.

[Hache]

Originally Posted by turrican3

It's a really good project !

good luck.

Thank you!!

[malko]

Nice project
Keep it up

[Lord Aga]

Wow, an awesome idea

If this works out, the same could be done for other games that are missing intros (or parts of them) in Amiga versions. Of course, with more manpower. We don't want to wear Hache out

[Predseda]

It is 46 frames only for the logo animation. How much frames do you expect for the whole intro?

[Hache]

Originally Posted by malko

Nice project
Keep it up

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

Wow, an awesome idea
If this works out, the same could be done for other games that are missing intros (or parts of them) in Amiga versions. Of course, with more manpower. We don't want to wear Hache out

Haha! That's the Idea! If this work fine it will be the first of many, I hope!

Originally Posted by Predseda

It is 46 frames only for the logo animation. How much frames do you expect for the whole intro?

If my calculations are correct, it would be 450/460 frames.

[saimon69]

Unfortunately there are no ready tools for it, else i would have said go for the 'another world' approach and use vectors to have more frames and less memory - fantavision and aegis animator are not exactly good for it due to the forced morph approach rather than keyframe - if they have a keyframe approach i did not find it at the time.

Hache i know you are a pro animator, however i can give you some hints from my dpaint time when i used to do animations too:

- first if you can try to get hands on dpaint 4 or Disney animation studio, to use the onion skinning features (lighttable in deluxe paint) - start with the wireframe in 4 colors, i used yellow and cyan to do wireframe then black to do the contours once the shape is done

- second, split in sequences and join it together with a program like scala; that should help with the syncing too - for the rate i would go to subsets of the frame rate - if you in pal i would say 12 FPS, in NTSC 15 - so that a sequence of 120 frames is 10 second in example.

Third, try to catch some old Eric Schwartz animation on youtube: you will see how sometimes he used pseudo motion blur to improve fluidity

[Hache]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Unfortunately there are no ready tools for it, else i would have said go for the 'another world' approach and use vectors to have more frames and less memory - fantavision and aegis animator are not exactly good for it due to the forced morph approach rather than keyframe - if they have a keyframe approach i did not find it at the time.

Hache i know you are a pro animator, however i can give you some hints from my dpaint time when i used to do animations too:

- first if you can try to get hands on dpaint 4 or Disney animation studio, to use the onion skinning features (lighttable in deluxe paint) - start with the wireframe in 4 colors, i used yellow and cyan to do wireframe then black to do the contours once the shape is done

- second, split in sequences and join it together with a program like scala; that should help with the syncing too - for the rate i would go to subsets of the frame rate - if you in pal i would say 12 FPS, in NTSC 15 - so that a sequence of 120 frames is 10 second in example.

Third, try to catch some old Eric Schwartz animation on youtube: you will see how sometimes he used pseudo motion blur to improve fluidity

Hi! Sorry. I don't understand when you say "Unfortunately there are no ready tools for it".
Thanks for the tips, but I already have in mind my personal workflow and it works great for me. Also, Saimon, remember the 3D intro/outro animations I've made for Rowan? I think these are heaviest than this and it was mixed together shot by shot in Amos without problem (If I have luck, I think here will be possible as well).
For sure I will split all the shots. One .anim per shot.
Regarding the motion blur, the idea is to give to this intro the same feeling of the original Amiga game, so no motion blur at all. Also, the original laser disc game doesn't have motion blur. Even if Dragon's Lair and Eric Schwartz animations are both cartoon, we're talking about different animation styles.
I'm going to move on on this without thinking too much and see which problems might come up as I make progress.

Thank you again for the tips!

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Hache

Hi! Sorry. I don't understand when you say "Unfortunately there are no ready tools for it".

Am specifically talking about vector animation, that use shapes instead of bitmaps, same as Another World

[Hache]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Am specifically talking about vector animation, that use shapes instead of bitmaps, same as Another World

Oh, I see, but I'm not an expert in this kind of animations on Amiga and I have this advanced enough to go in a different way. Anyway, I appreciate your comments and I will keep it in mind for a next project.

Thank you!!!

[Hache]

SHOT_00 Color

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LXC...ew?usp=sharing

[Lord Aga]

Man this is awesome

Thanks for sharing! I love this project so much!

[malko]

Class

[amiman99]

Good luck! So far it looks nice.

It would be nice to somehow integrate your animation with the original game, and make it playable on CDTV/CD32, or WHDLoad.

[Hache]

Originally Posted by Lord Aga

Man this is awesome

Thanks for sharing! I love this project so much!

Originally Posted by malko

Class

Thank you so much, guys!!!

Originally Posted by amiman99

Good luck! So far it looks nice.

It would be nice to somehow integrate your animation with the original game, and make it playable on CDTV/CD32, or WHDLoad.

Thank you! As I said, I will need a coder and a sound designer to make it possible but that would be exactly one of my goals!

[amiman99]

@hache ,Do you want the sound to be converted to IFF per scene, or digitize using Amiga sampler?

[Hache]

Originally Posted by amiman99

@hache ,Do you want the sound to be converted to IFF per scene, or digitize using Amiga sampler?

Well, first of all, my idea is to do one .anim file per shot, and then that some coder join all the shots, in order to be played in sequence.
Regarding the audio, I don't have any knowledge in this area. What would be better? Split the audio for each scene or play the whole audio while the animations are running?
I think that if the audio is splitted by shot, it could have some cuts or silences between one shot and another, but this is just a theory.

PS: Sorry for my bad english.

[amiman99]

8bit 22khz intro sound in iff format 1mb size (11khz could be half the size, but worst quality), I'll put it in "the zone" too.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kx3rqgmqy3...it22k.iff?dl=0

[Hache]

Originally Posted by amiman99

8bit 22khz intro sound in iff format 1mb size (11khz could be half the size, but worst quality), I'll put it in "the zone" too.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kx3rqgmqy3...it22k.iff?dl=0

Wow wow wow !!! Jaw drop!!! I just heard it. It sounds AMAZING!!! Great job and thanks for your help!!