Hi all, this is my first time posting WIP to the forum. I'm fairly new to cleaning up on a pixel level so I thought I'd post. I'm drawing this using Inchworm Animation on my Nintendo DSi.

I'm having fun with this piece... been in a Harryhausen mood, so that was the inspiration for this. Plus, my 2yr old girl loves dinosaurs and this one is for her.

As I was designing and animating the tank, I saved these drawings to a model sheet to help me keep the tank on model. I was still playing with the design as well...


I decided to make the tank a fictitious rocket launcher type of tank. The rocket is still rough. Here's the tank animated...

I'll probably clean up the rocket fx next... fire and smoke stuff. I also want to add dust fx for when the tank slams on the breaks and then peels out. I'm also thinking about dithering the tracks/tread on the tank when it peels out instead of the straight horizontal lines to simulate blur as an experiment... we'll see how that turns out.

And here's the T-Rex, still very rough...

After fleshing out the T-Rex, I'll probably take another pass at shading the tank, having a shadow cast on it when it drives under the T-Rex.

Woah. Keep working on this, so far no critics from me. Amazing job, it all seems to flow quite nicely. That T-rex, even for a sketch, it looking mighty fine. Keep it up. :)

Extremely good thus far.

The animation is good, not sure how you went about doing it.

Did you do it on something else before it on a pixel level?

Also, did you use any keyframes and if so, may I have a peek?

Rocket drawn in. Added dirt kicking up from the tank peeling out, Magnum P.I. style :)

Thanks!

Yes, I am planning on adding a BG. The next step is to work on cleaning up one of the T-Rex drawings to figure out the design and color. After that I'll find a palette that works well with both T-Rex and Tank. Probably something desaturated. That's the plan at least.

When designing the T-Rex I might look at illustrator Mark Teague or designer Peter De Seve for inspiration. I also like the color work of illustrator and friend Israel Sanchez, and my wife Eren Unten... and I'm not just saying that because she's my wife.

I do have things already in mind for the T-Rex like having the eyes in shadow under the brow ridge, and some sort of stripe or pattern along the spine to describe the form turning in space. We'll see.

Rockets don't have recoil - or virtually none anyway. The only thing you might feel is a bit of friction of the missile rubbing/pushing against the launching tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqUb23XCTCY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BNAoOaYyEg

I'm not sure what scale the tank is? Trex' are about 5 meter high IIRC. That would make the tank.. 1,5~2 meter high which seems very small. Is it an RC car?

Ok, you are right about the recoil, but the T-rex doesn't have his famous arms. ;(

On a side note, I haven't done this yet but I plan to add another visual cue to make the tank's peel-out clearer and stronger by adding one frame of anticipation of the tracks rearing up before digging down.

Also when I make the BG, I'll have elements in there for scale, perhaps a tree or something, so that the tank and T-rex don't feel miniature.

Hey Wayne, great job working on this so far. This might be my favourite pixel animation thus far, if you're able to get this beast rendered! Sorry for going off-topic here, but do you have a website or portfolio? This animation and what I can see from your preview thumbnail piece on your gallery gives me tons of inspiration to animate, and I'd love to check out more.

Hi!

You animate so awesomely! I can imagine why you work at Disney ;)

However, you have some coloring to do. With pixelart color is a much discussed topic, so much possibilities and so different from traditional media because pixel art is light emitting!

Lots of people strive to create their pieces with an as low number of colors possible.

Even for those who don't have interest in such restrictions we recommend not to use more colors than necessarily. With small palettes your works easily become good works, I mean that the overall feel of the work will be the same, while some people can really make a mess of colors.

This is not the case with your tank (yet), but it does feature a very boring set of colors. Low contrast, nothing pops out, and an unnecessary high count.
You will learn about the fun of reducing the color count gradually as you make more and more pixel art, for now it might be easiest to accept that everybody expects you to try to do it.

19 colors for a small tank which features only 4 different colors (green, purple, brown and gray) is really a lot! Also, if you mix these colors and take out the grays you get a much more interesting piece. Here is some examples of interesting low color count works.

8 colors:


A bit more (10 & 12)


As you see limiting your colors does not mean having a monotone piece...


I am not among those amazing artist, but I do like to play with colors myself too. I made an example here!



19 colors is way too much! I reduced it to 10 without changing the look of the tank. This is a must do!

In the next step I raised the contrast, and I had the feeling it needed an extra color to pop out, so I added red but it did not really work well.
On the left side I also edited the shapes inside the tank, while the right tank is left untouched all the time, just the palette changes.

The next step is dropping back to something more traditional, perhaps the look you are going for. But then higher contrast, better defined parts, and again I dropped 2 colors!

After that I played around with it a bit, first 'safely' by staying in the green zone, and then going completely the other way, which has worked great I think, except that it might be too obvious for you that this one uses only 8 colors, it might do better/more realistic with 10 or 12.

Good luck with coloring. I hope I can once learn some animation from you too ;).

Hapiel

Hi Delicious,
I really am new to pixel art animation, but thanks for the kind words! This piece is my first attempt at following the "Creating Pixel Art" standards that Cure posted about so I don't really have a portfolio of "pixel art" animation.

I can show you the stuff I first animated when Inchworm Animation came out on the DSi in April, but as Cure pointed out in his tutorial, it's more on the oekaki side. I was just having fun with it, even comp-ing my animation with live-action plates on the first two...



...so those were fun, but there's a craft to Pixel Art that I'd like to learn and start steering toward. That's my intent with this new piece.

Alex,
I like the portability of animating on my DSI, otherwise I wouldn't have time to do any of this. The disadvantage is that it doesn't have the extensive functionality that a program like Photoshop does. Also, the image on my DSI screen is slightly different in brightness and contrast than what we see on a computer screen, but when I'm done with the piece I'll correct it in Photoshop.

Hapiel,
Thanks for your post! This is exactly why I joined the forum. I agree that the color count is too high. My original intent was to only use a few colors. I accidentally used similar colors with similar values and only noticed it when I exported the images to make a GIF. On the dinosaur I made an onscreen palette just to make sure I stick with the number intended. Lesson learned.

I agree with the contrast, I'm not happy with how bright inside the wheel well is, and definitely plan to do a color timing/correction pass when the entire piece is done.

I really like what you did in the 4th option down with adding slight blue to the housing of the rocket launcher. If you don't mind I'd like to emulate that.    

For the overall color choice for the tank, I deliberately wanted it less vibrant, but thanks for putting those last 2 examples together. I'm saving the vibrant colors for the T-rex!   

UNDERSTATEMENT

Of course it is okay to put in blue on your tank ;). Having blue/purple as darkest color and yellow/green/cyan as brightest colors are my favorite things to do with any piece btw!

im jealous of your animation skills :)

I can't wait to see how this turns out. I admire your animation skills and all you need is to learn the pixel art techniques to be a great pixel artist - it won't take long given your positive attitude. It's great to have you in the community, we will all learn a lot from your presence! :)

Something like this would make a great weekly challenge


+bump

Congratulations!!

About the rex: I like the version with the red eyebrows the best, but yeah animating is going to take some time! Especially with all the dithering you got going on!

Good luck!

Congratulations! She's beautiful.

I like your ref images and gives the T-Rex a unique look. I like the all red head also but I imagine some blue on the forehead will make for a better reading animation.

Something to keep in mind as you plan the T-Rex frames and especially coloring. Dithering in animations can be a very tough road. Dithered animations often end up having a dirty/noisy/artifact look that almost always looks poor. This doesn't mean its not doable, just that its truly hard to pull off. Generally speaking, cell-shading is a safer road onto which you can add details and elaborate once all the frames and action is set.
There is a technique, considered advanced by most, called sub-pixelling that could solve your obvious need to blend traditionally (newb ) plus help to visually suggest scales once animated.
There are plenty of sub-pixelling examples in the gallery and as I find or remember real good examples I'll post them here for your review. For now I only have these examples to show. Maybe others have good examples to post here for you too.


*When you're up at 3AM cause your baby is up and won't go back to sleep check THIS out.



Edited by jalonso - 10 July 2011 at 6:14am

Thanks everyone for the comments.

Jalonso, I felt the same way about the dithering possibly looking noisy when animated.   When I animate it, I'm going to try keeping the dither pattern consistent from frame to frame to avoid fizzling. If that doesn't work I'll do a straight change of color (cel shade).

The sub-pixel blending idea is an interesting one... almost like an alternate form of anti-aliasing that exists on a sub-pixel level using the physical properties of a display (RGB). I understand it's application and the benefit of it for small sub-pixel line or curve work, but for blending color over a large area it seems like sub-pixel shading would not be ideal.

If you look closely, I'm doing an anti-alias on the blending between a few of the teeth to gums on the T-Rex, but might try experimenting with sub-pixels for fun. Sounds cool. So, assuming displays are RGB, if I want a pixel to weight more on the left I would choose a warmer color and if I want more weight on the right of a pixel I choose a cooler color?

Ah! So it is pretty much AA. Thanks for the link Cure! I like the Samus example best, where the interior shifts but the silhouette is mostly locked. Sweet stuff.

Don't know how much I'll use that technique on the T-Rex since subframe animation seems geared more toward subtle movement. Personally, I kinda prefer crisp movement over soft and blurry, but it could be a good tool to use one day if I want to vary the texture of movement in a character. Thanks guys.

What happened in your mind when you chose to animate pixel art? This has got to be the most time consuming tiny animation ever ;).

As much as I like your animation, I still challenge you to review your colours!

<- I think some subpixelling is going on here, on the brim of his hat, on the second "down". At least that's what I felt I needed at the time, a way to move it by half a pixel.

Amazing animation, *and* dinosaur design ^-^

Sergiotron, thanks! When I do find time to work on this, I'm having a blast.

Neofotistou, thanks and I like how your Wizard walk animation turned out (I saw it a few weeks ago in the WIP forum). I also like your shading on your avatar. Nice colors.