Plants vs Zombies

Leech

Easy question - how did these guys make the art and animation for this game? What programs, techniques? It is so smooth I don't think it is rendering sprites, it appears their engine is animating vector objects in real time.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZt4U8vsZFc&feature=related[/ame]

Be as thorough as you want with your answers

renderhjs

I can say with almost 100% certainty by using Flash. It's just about spending a crazy amount of time tweaking animations on the timeline.

If its the xbox or any ported version it most likely uses either a middle ware to use the Flash Player in a GPU accelerated environment (there are middle ware solutions for the xbox 360 for example and it is used in many games for menu coding / development).

The other way would be to export the flash animations as a sprite sheet by using AIR or Actionscript itself or simply with the export animation command in Flash.


There was once (there still is but it sunk) the Tab:
http://www.the-tab.com/
Which seemed to be a nice competitor to Flash in terms of crispy Vector graphics yet rigged or smooth animations tool but it failed. Marble software another company
http://www.lostmarble.com/
tried to compete with flash as well with their impressive bone rigging features in Moho. To bad they couldn't produce enough earnings so they had to create a teenage version of it: Anime Studio
http://anime.smithmicro.com/
And of course anime's are not created with it but that target group won't notice - truly a sad story.


For After Effects you have the puppet pin tool which meshes (generates lots of small triangles) a transparent selection (just like the cloth modifiers in most 3d apps). It's great for deforming bitmap content and the new Photoshop CS5 has that technology as well just not animate able as far as I know. See how it works here:
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/aftereffects/articles/aftcs3it_puppettool_02.html