Creature - 2D Skeletal Animation Tool that Automates Walk Cycles, Cloth/Hair and more!

Editors and Tools
#1

Hello Cocos2DX Devs,
I am the developer of Creature, an exciting new cutting edge 2D animation tool that is soon to be launched! With Creature, you can add stunningly fluid animation to your Cocos2DX digital content. At the core of Creature is a highly advanced skeletal animation, mesh deformation and dynamics system.

Creature is now out on the Mac App Store!
Link:

Full suite of tools for Rigging your Skeletal Character, Meshing and applying Auto-Weighting:

Adjust all animation Splines across the timeline easily in Animation Mode:

Automated Animation - Quick and Easy Walk Cycles, Hair, Cloth, Flesh and More!

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.

Trailer and Website

Please check out the trailer video to find out more about what I am describing:

Website:
http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/index.html

Full documentation provided:
http://www.kestrelmoon.com/creaturedocs/Tutorials_And_Walkthroughs/Quickstart.html

Here are some examples of Creature’s Directible Automated Animation in action.

Hair, Cloth Dynamics, Automated Walk Cycles

The mage below has Hair and Cloth simulated using the Dynamics/Physics motors of Creature. The walk cycle is automatically generated using Walk Motors:

Soft Body Dynamics, Chain Physics, Advanced Mesh Deformation

The chameleon creature below has Soft Body Dynamics applied to its body so it has a “fleshy” reactionary response to its underlying skeletal motion. The tongue is simulated using Bone Physics Dynamics Motors and advanced Control Pt Warp motors that allow it to deform and extend/compress the tongue. The eyes are deformed using Control Pt Mesh Motors and the legs are automatically walking via Walk Motors:

Animating Whole Images

Creature can also work on whole complete images like this tiger. The subtle breathing/keep alive motion is generated via fancy Rotate Motors and Bend Bone Motors. There is also mesh deformation going on that deforms the eyes for blinking:

Path Animation

You can make your characters animate along user defined spline paths, as seen in this phoenix below. The wings are animated with Flap Motors while the tails follow Automatically via Bone Bend Physics motors:

Export Formats with Cocos2d-x Support

Creature supports a wide variety of export formats(Sprite Sheets, Movie, Gif, Fbx for bone motors) as well as the major game toolkits.
Creature also supports Cocos2DX runtimes in C++ which can be integrated easily into your game/app. Creature essentially exports mesh and bone frame positions out into a JSON file for your Cocos2DX runtime to read in live in your app/game.

Here is the link to the runtimes documentation:
http://www.kestrelmoon.com/creaturedocs/Game_Engine_Runtimes_And_Integration/Runtimes_Introduction.html

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 Cocos2DX runtimes so any suggestions/tips will be appreciated.

Cheers!
Chong

4 Likes
#2

Very cool. I’d like to know when it is ready to download…

#3

Thanks for your interest in Creature! Right now it has already been submitted to Apple and should be out on the Mac App Store in 1.5 weeks. Let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions!

#4

Nice. Very excited for a new skeletal animation toolkit!!!. Looking forward to it. Cheers!

#5

Looks very interesting.

#6

Going to definitely check this out. The animation with motors and pathing animations look interesting. Can I ask what major frameworks/languages you used to create the app?

#7

Hi there!
Thanks for your interest in Creature! The app was written in pure C++ for the backend and the frontend is using Apple’s Cocoa framework.

Cheers!

1 Like
#8

Extremely impressed! How about it’s performance and memory footprint on mobile devices?

#9

Thanks for your compliments! The performance and memory requirements completely depend on the resolution of the animation meshes you use in your app. I will record a demo streaming off my ipad with multiple characters, basic AI and environmental effects and post it onto this forum. The demo is currently running on my iPad and it includes a couple of rather complex characters: A large dragon, multiple Mage characters (complex meshes) and some rabbits.

Each character has at least 5000 - 10000 vertices each, so this is a slightly heavier demo. From simple profiling (not in depth), it shows a memory footprint of about 80mb total for these complex characters.

Please take note that not all characters need to be this complex. This is just a demo to push as much complexity as possible into the runtime to see what it can handle. I believe most characters should have much simpler meshes, especially if fancy deformations are not required.

There is mesh decimimation in Creature that allows the user to down res (or up res) the resolution of your animation meshes to optimize them properly for mobile devices.

The video link is here running off my iPad:

The video is streamed through WIFI, so the frame rates don’t accurately reflect that of the actual device which is a lot smoother.

#10

Creature has just launched and is now out on the Mac App Store!
Link:
http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/purchase.html

I am also very happy to say that Creature now also supports the amazing new Cocos2d-HTML5 V4!
Check out the Cocos2d-HTML5 V4 demos here:
http://hyperandroid.github.io/Cocos2d-html5/src/test/engine/creature.html

These animations are all authored using Creature and exported out for playback.

Cheers!

#11

I love to see more competition in this field, us dev win.

I see that the “Basic” paid app is $99 US, how much does the “Pro” IAP cost? Please verify, since you are selling it through the Mac App Store I assume there is no annual license fee for using the runtime library, nor “per app” fee/royalty?

Finally, is the runtime library open source? My concern with closed-source runtimes is that if they ever stop being officially supported and stop working, there is no way for the community to update it and unofficially keep it alive.

#12

Hello,

Thanks for your interest in Creature. The upgrade to Pro costs $170 USD.
There is no annual license fee, no per app royalty fees, none of that.
If you are curious why I included IAP, it’s because I had originally intended to sell a Basic and Pro version separately. However, Apple told me they would prefer I sell just one version so as not to confuse people.

As far as the runtime library is concerned, you are free to use the source runtimes once you have purchased a copy of Creature. In fact, I am in talks with the Cocos2d-x folks to package the source runtime into their package manager. Right now, runtime sources are downloaded from within the application. I provide live download links from within Creature to allow you to grab the runtimes. In the future, you will also be able to grab them directly from the new Cocos2d-x package manager too.

On a side note, this is the first release of Creature. I do intend to support Cocos2d-x in a major way which means I will be adding any features/suggestions to the Cocos2d-x runtimes based on user requirements. Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Cheers!

#13

Here is Creature running in the brand new Cocos2d-html5 V4 Alpha preview:

http://hyperandroid.github.io/Cocos2d-html5/src/test/engine/creature.html

Exciting times!

#14

It’s unfortunate that the free demo from your website does not allow for using some of the advanced features, such as motion capture / rotoscoping. I’m hesitant to spend almost $170 without trying these advanced features.

Could you change your demo to allow us to try all the features of pro, without the ability to save projects, export projects, and version control? This way we could try out every feature and make sure it works as promised.

#15

Hello,

Thanks for your advice on the trial version. It is definitely something I will look into! The trial version code path is a bit different from the full version so let me take a look at meeting your request while making sure export and saving options are disabled.

Are you mostly interested in the rotoscoping aspects of the app or something else? The basic version allows you to use all of the bone physics motors. In fact, the following example was done fully in the basic version:
http://hyperandroid.github.io/Cocos2d-html5/src/test/engine/creature.html

Cheers!

#16

$269 for Basic + Pro and nothing more ever. For my company (high revenue - high licensing fees = low profit) that is better that either Unity or Spine. We will definitely be be considering it.

3 Likes
#17

Hello,

Thanks for your interest in Creature!
As I mentioned, this is the first initial release of Creature and I am going be supporting it long term.
Feel free to contact me through the website ( http://creature.kestrelmoon.com ) if you require any additional features in the Coco2d-x runtime. I am more than happy to put them in as long as they fit within my schedule.

Cheers!