Very cool, captures the feel of a CPS-2 game. I like the left (right?) hand animation.
I really liked it! and .... I do not know what to say because I loved!
Ignore the sperges, it's a good animation, and I like how the smoke's animated. I swear, most of these people would tear apart the graphics in the most popular games of old if they had the chance.
Hello, see you in the next monthly TOP, very good. Congratulations, it was perfect.
Lazy is not exactly what I had in mind ;)
If there are coding reasons for animating this way and this is intended for a game, then of course disregard the crit. (Isn't this a very large sprite for an actual game?)
As for the shading, it's not a matter of more shades (looks like more than 16 colors, which is amply enough) but of pixelling. The ref you linked is actually somewhat better in this respect, the blue part of the legs gives a strong feeling of volume and lightsource, even reflected light and some texture. This (or better) is what I think you could achieve. Once again, it requires a different treatment than your smaller pieces.
I might try an edit on the still piece if I find some time.
Edit: stupid of me to mention muscle, that's right ;P
The legs don't bend because I was thinking that if this were used as a game asset, specifically for an intense action game, it would be confusing (e.g. hitbox propotion) and an eyesore if the height of the idle pose bobbed around too much. At the same time I wanted to give it some movement so I used the techniqe Capcom used for Sentinel in X-Men: Children of the Atom. If the technique is good enough for one of the best looking and best animated games ever I don't think it's too much of an offense. Limited shades also shouldn't be an issue except as a matter of taste because I used more shades than Arc System Works used for Guilty Gear X and BlazBlue. Anyway, if you think this is lazy you'll just have to wait for more complex animations like walking.
@Manupix; do you really see a humanoid here?
And in my opinion, it's not only cute enough to be considered an OK piece, but also pretty convincing with its steam-powered looks. Yes steam powered robots is not something we're used to see in daily life but we've seen enough of this movement style in manga.
Also if you look closer you'll see right and left arms are redrawn a few times.
It's all about how much realism you want. I don't beleive you have to redraw the whole body for every frame for a convincing animation, but tweaking the whole body is essential. Just rescupting the upper arms a pixel or two and slightly adjusting the shading and highlights would go a long way to smoothing out the forearm movements.
Nice job overall though.
I'm not really sure that animation critique applies to this piece, it's clearly a robot so the muscle etc. are just crafted on it's armour for apearance sake. It looks like it's moving on pistons, as if some lazy AI programmer has tried to simulate a fighting/breathing stance (which I'd say is a realistic interpretation for a robot) -it surely doesn't actually need to breath.
Yes? I'm not sure what you intended linking this, but it has the exact same issues (although a bit more detailed). Is it something you made, or used as a ref?
http://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters3/sentinal-stance.gif
Sorry, but this is not a very convincing anim. Unfortunately, moving rigid body parts will never make a realistic animated humanoid. For instance, the legs: actual movement involves rotations around the ankle and knee; which result in changes of perspective and foreshortening. And I'm not even talking about how muscles change appearance! (leaving that to cure)
In short, you have to redraw the whole body for every frame. Pretty much daunting at this scale, but there's no shortcut.
Also, the shading is not very consistent, and the simple stylistic shading / coloring that make your small sprites attractive doesn't really work at this larger scale.
I'd suggest to work on these issues at an intermediate manageable scale (half the size of this?).
Excellent, very smooth. Because of the name though, I spent ages expecting it to punch :P
I love the movements of the fingers