WIP Sprinting animation. Recently added the hair motion, but I'm wondering about how to shade the ponytail and such.

I had this as a version earlier, but it ended up looking a bit unnatural. Someone described it as looking like it was separate from the rest of the animation.

Otherwise, I should be able to fix the torso shift pretty easily.

1st as in the first draft, or 1st as in the one on the 1st post? I'm a bit confused.

I prefer first version too. Feels more natural.

Sloppy edit ahead.

While you've certainly got a run animation, I don't think its a sprint.
A few things that I think characterize a sprint.
1. Long leavers. those are arms and legs fully extending. Even in my edit I think the legs could come back further to really exaggerate the movement.
2. For run animations in general, please don't make animations that extend and Land way past their center of gravity. Basically if you land on heel far ahead of your center of gravity you create a braking force, so while you are definitely moving forward, you are doing so, much slower than you should. I should mention that landing directly under you centre of gravity is extremely hard in reality, but do try and get kinda close with animations. Land so far ahead of your center of gravity also greatly increases your chances of injury if you are a real person lol
3. Exaggerate, Exaggerate ,Exaggerate, its an animation, make it snappy, bouncy and interesting to look at (I'm not saying I've done that though).
4. Some rotation across the chest is normal, not to much or it will look weird. The shoulders tend to shrug back a bit when you extend backwards.

The character in the edit hangs a bit to much, there is an extra frame behind the key frames where the character is fully extended in her run (just duplicates). If I had more time, I'd change those frames to create a smoother transition into the extended key frames.


It should go with out saying that there is no one right way of doing things in animation. Your imagination is only your limit. But learning the fundamentals of what you're animating can go a long way in making more believable animations.

I have also noticed a lot of bad references of running animations on googles image search :(

Hope that helps :)
Also, hair .

Animations looks very nice. How long did you animate this piece?

wow thats fast, I do this stuff 7-8 hours and it looks wrong all the time x_X keep up animating !

I don't understand the chest. Are her clavicles bouncing? Or did you draw her breasts very high up? I'm not sure you need any kind of bouncing there at all.

The AA on the legs, specifically the front, looks odd to me. You don't have AA anywhere else, and I'm not sure why you need it.

Fixed up the legs because they were a bit all over the place in regards to where the knees were, reshaded them, messed with the hands to make them fold in, toyed with the breasts some more, and upped the speed by one pip because I thought it looked a bit better.

I agree. First I wasn't seeing the problem, and to me it was good, but then I focused on a point and then on another.

If you keep your yes in the foot, you'll see that it seems like it's repeating the same foot.

I searched for some running animations and I found this:


What I can see here is that the leg that's in the back is darker than the front, try to do the same on your sprite. I would recommend to change the color of the shoes to something less black, or at least the right shoe(the one in the front plane) to some gray, but first, just put some darker color(shadow) in that left leg.

Makes sense. Darkened the back leg and arm, so hopefully that made it a bit clearer.