I just finished cooking the next one.
In this video I’ve added something I’ve been thinking of doing since the first one, which is to have little animations when a unit acts or a SOUL ability is being used. These appear as little animations on the bottom of each side acting.
The process to create these was fairly straightforward. First step was the place the unit art on a “green screen” background, since the model is not capable of generating transparent backgrounds. Then I used the open weights Wan2.2 model on ComfyUI, and prompted it to perform the animation that fits the act. Finally I added the finished result in kdenlive with a chroma key effect for green which allowed the unit to have a transparent background again.
Now the animations are not incredible as the model is not that capable of complex movements, especially for weird designs like these, but they give a little extra action on the side which doesn’t interfere with the main game-play.
I did try to make some animations involving multiple units (you’ll see like 3) by combining two units in the same image. But it was both very complex to arrange (I had to ask the model to first make the character face each other for example and then use the final frame from that as the next frame for the next), and also the result were pretty bad. Most of the time, one character wouldn’t animate at all, and the whole thing was very basic. So ultimately I scrapped that idea and stayed with a single unit. If a more capable open-weights model appears in the future I’ll give this another go.