What's the best way to go about animating/creating "Ultimate" attacks?

[ForestLogic]

I know there's workarounds for doing more complex animations in the maker, but I was curious to know if there's any way to go even further than the confines of the in-maker attack animation editor. It's only 200 frames right? So about 6 seconds worth?

Is it possible to play movies/video files in the middle of battle for a cinematic attack animation? if not, are there any plugins which let you extend past the 200 frame limit? Or better yet, are there any plugins which let you just reference an animation sheet to play one automatically?

Any advice would be incredibly helpful. I've got a few connections that do great animations, and I dabble in it myself. I have an idea for team-up attacks between two party members where I'd like to showcase those animations, but don't know if I can quite pull 'em off in the regular animation-editor in MV. Thanks!

 

[bgillisp]

The editor only lets you import 200 frames (2 sheets of 100), but...the engine runs at 15 FPS by default, which means that is 200 / 15 = 13.33 seconds for an animation, if you have one per sheet. But, I don't know if that is really the limit for the animation as the animation has you select the sheet to run per frame, and I don't know if anyone has tried running an animation using say sheets 1 - 10 on loop for 250 frames to see what it does.

However...many players hate long animations in my experience. I'd suggest trying to keep them short, even ultimate attacks. FF7 is known for some really long and pointless animations, and I honestly remember reading a book during the animations in FF8 for those guardian summons (yes, even though I could boost, as the gain wasn't worth the button mashing to get it in my experience).

 

[ForestLogic]

Oh, I never realized the default FPS was 15. 13 seconds is actually WAY more than long enough then, haha.

That said, do you know if MV lets you display movie files in-battle? That would be a lot easier than messing around with trying to make a complex animation line up properly in the confines of the animation editor.

 

[bgillisp]

No idea on that, sorry.

Also, if you want the animations to run faster, I think Yanfly's plug-in gives an option to run them at 20, 30 and 60 FPS if you prefer. I think it defaults to 20 FPS so if you use that be careful, as now you really have 200 / 20 = 10 seconds.

 

[ForestLogic]

Yeah I'm using YEP Battle Core. I think 10 seconds would be a pretty reasonable ceiling for them.