Hello again folks.

Well I'm workin on more spritin stuff lately and was animating a character of a friend's story thingy whatever. It was all well and dandy until I decided to make an attacking animation... and thanks to my fear of frame-by-frame and insistence on reusing already-drawn parts of the body it was just.... so... so godaweful. so weak. so pathetic. It actually shocked me into abandoning that pisspoor animation style altogether (hopefully)


Now what I've got is going much, MUCH better. But I'd love any feedback you folks have on it:






Obviously still very much a WIP with stand-in colors so i can tell armor parts apart and such. Please, let me know what you think :D

(oh, and if the swings are slow that's the browser. It plays fast and fine on my windows firefox but this Mac's firefox plays it slower. Ah well)

doubleedit: after looking at it zoomed in a while that hair braid in the back (not the pony tail) is bothering the hell out of me how it blips up and down. Ill get that fixed.


Edit: Current

Sword Swing:


Running:


Standing:


Looking Around:


Portrait:



Edited by Zeratanus - 30 October 2009 at 8:58am

the only thing i could thing of to improve it would be to have the head turn ever so slightly less to the right on the follow through. I can understand that the body is forcing the head to follow through along with it, but i think it would look more natural if She seemed to be attempting to keep her Eye on the target. Super nice flow though so far.

Thanks for the input. I stopped working on it for a while but heres my current progress:




I just started a running animation too




I want to finish the sword swinging one but Im still debating on the armor. It's a friend's character so I dont have complete freedom but most of what I've done doesnt read as well as i want it to. but I'm still workin on it

I'll second this. I think she got a bit skinnier and taller in the run, but it may be an illusion from the different angles.

Yeah, I'm planning on animating the body and head more, just gettin down the basics for now :) And the ponytail will be ticker - like the body it's just a stand-in to get a feel for the movement.

I think you're both right though - she does seem taller and thinner. She's the same amount of pixels tall (through most of the animation) but since she's leaning forward she should be a few pixels shorter instead. I'll fix that up for the next update.

Thanks for the input :D

Finally working on this again. Got the armor down, but the reds are still solid and I think the hair needs a darker color for the lineart in the darkest areas...

I don't like the legs at all, the tiny step shows no real weight or force behind it.
Making the animation kind of lack weight with the tiny step, perhaps straighten his leg out?

Also his armor rotation on his hips is very odd.

Angel - Thanks. And i keep pasting the redone frames over the previous frames in photoshop, so i guess i did miss a few stray pixels <<. I'll try to weed them out.

Souly, Architectus - Yeah, I see what you mean, though I was thinking of this animation coming from and returning to a standing pose (which I haven't made yet :\), but I do think that ending the animation with the leg farther back would give more "umf" to the 2nd swing, and still let me use it with a standing pose with another frame or two added at the end to return to it... once I make it lol.

Souly - Also, it's a chick :P. Maybe not the most obvious thing, just thought I'd point it out. And I don't see what you mean about the hip-armor. If you could elaborate that would be great :)

Architectus - its 11 frames at the moment.


Thanks you three :D



Edit:

Added another shade color for the hair and shaded the red undergarments with one of the skin's shades. Brings it up to 20 colors (with transparency)total :<. 3 unique for the slash, 1 for the eyes. Threw the leg back farther too. how's it look?

vs

Edit2:

started working on this too, but ran out of steam halfway through.




Edited by Zeratanus - 11 September 2009 at 8:21am

Wow! Looking awesome, I really like this

I think that moving her head back a few pixels (Or thereabouts) Might improve the look, but I could be completely guessing.

On the sword animation, throwing the leg back would make it harder for a follow-through stroke.  It would seem...unwise to so unbalance (if the 'intent' of the fighter is to keep defence forward - I assume she is attacking a creature to the right).  But a nice leg sweep to help the stroke carry further back is cool (in that animé way)!  So I like the first pose better, but if you want the drama, try putting more 'power' into the leg (in cartoons they'll drag dust to show this, or have the foot hit the ground from a bent-knee position).

The hair, and ponytail bounce are terrific, but I think the eyes do need a bit more 'looking to the side' than they have, to agree with Hatch's point about tracking intent through the eyes.

For the running animation, when one of those leading feet hits the ground it does so completely flat, rather than catching with the heel.  I've found that the most economic animation then follows the heel catch with the foot flat below the body and taking its weight.  The next frame then has the foot behind the body with the toes bent (for the 'kick-off' of the body's weight).  Then the foot is behind and in the air (having kicked off) and the opposite foot is coming forward and ready to do the heel catch in this or the next frame.

Also, the chin sticks out much farther than the sword animation would suggest she is capable of, even though the 'head forward' pose adds intent to the animation.  Compare the sword animation head when it's looking the most to the right to see a possible disparity here.
Also the hips don't seem to shift back and forth enough relative to the waist to help the illusion of running (don't stretch the skirting faulds below the breastplate too much unless they're supposed to be cloth and not plate armour - have her legs come out of the joints).

I really like this sprite and look forward to more of it.

Love how the leg comes out between the armour plates, and how the back of the plates bounces out a bit.  Love the ponytail bounce and hair colours.  Love how much detail is put into such a small sprite.

The heel catch is much better now, but still reads kinda flat (though she does have small feet).

Pushing the head back helped by, erm, one pixel's worth.  Here's what I'm seein' in case it's just me:



The first pic (on the left) is practically done (and loved) and if can be taken as an instance of reality, then the image on the right does not fully conform to that reality.  The 'V' shapes I've drawn call attention to what I see is a well-integrated head with body (left) and an overweighted head on a body that now (optical illusion O.o) looks too small (right).

Not that I wish to argue for weak chinned characters (!), but (in this humble servant's tiny opinion) she will read as a far more endearing sprite with a more receded chin (as perfectly portrayed in the sword sprite).  I may have been watching too much animé, though, so I'll close off on that and leave the judgement to you.

I can't wait to see more of this!

UGH!

Please help me with this standing animation. I've got no good ideas on how to animate that don't look ugly and boring.




I stink at "ready" style stand animations...


Fixed the shape of the shoulder on the running animation too - made it more consistently rounded.

I know next to nothing about spriting - 3 months ago I didn't even know what a sprite was :0 - but I'd say this: most idle anims I've seen have this kind of bobbing, breathing moves, which I don't find natural looking. Maybe it's ok ingame if the sprite has been in full action and needs to take a breath, but on its own it looks silly. I'd suggest trying something more relaxed, like simple head movements: looking around, or up and down. If it means anything in the game, of course.

I like the running one a lot, except that it seems her legs get shorter in the intermediate frames (2 to 5, and 8).

The sword one looks great too. I just don't really recognize her from the running: she's got a very cute profile with that little nose, I don't find this in the other views.

Great work already anyways!

yeah that works :)

if u fancy being a bit flash u could also make her crouch down on one knee. i have seen that happen in games before.

nicely done tho. well done

Steve

Correct me if I'm wrong, but with the animation of the hair... is that subpixel movement? That's really rather clever, I don't actually see that very often!

now i really like the eyebrow movement on the looking around one.

so i have played around with adding a bit of it to your breathing one, while eliminating the fringe hair movement in the process as it couldnt take both animations :)

gone crosseyed in the process of messing with this. not used to it anymore. you may like it, u may hate it.

Steve

Looks good!
Shouldn't the breast movement start first instead of last?
And, the subpixelling attempt in the shoulder doesn't work, I think. Can't really say why...

I'm afraid I don't agree with you, Chan. While the run is perhaps 2 frames shorter than a lot of running animations, I think it's clear enough that they cross, and it looks like a run to me (as well as looking like most run cycles I've looked up from the SNES). I did adjust the forward leg while its passing to look a bit less straight though.


And I have to entirely disagree with an overhead swing - with a one handed weapon there are many more muscles to put into a side swing than an overhead swing. With a two handed weapon where you put your entire body into the swing and the weapon itself has more mass then a overhead swing is more practical.

It was lacking a darker shading area on the red areas though, so I do agree with that, and have added it. I also added a bit of shading on the hip armor on the same side.


@Manupix - changed the breast movement to start earlier, so lets see if that helps. Removed the color change on the shoulder too (is that what subpixeling is? xD)

Other changes:
*Bit of a change in the standing idle's eyebrow movement
*Change in the eyes and chin in the looking around one when she looks back.
*There was a bit of a glitch on the hip armor in the run, so I changed that to move a bit smoother.

Here's the latest on all of them:







Edited by Zeratanus - 07 October 2009 at 2:03pm

Thanks for all the feedback, Crow 

Finally got around to editing some: got the body length shortened (man and i really thought i was measuring those... stupid me) and changed the looking around animation significantly (cut out some frames, changed the looking back frame that blurred, and edited the braids in a lot of frames so they didnt move around as much). Also tweaked the running animation like you suggested :)

Ah, alright, i think i've ironed out the head problem now. Though I have to disagree with the body thing - now yours looks too short to me x3. sorry about that.

I also changed the idle animation to have the newer arms-up pose from the looking around animation.




And I'm afraid I just haven't had any time to start a new animation, but to offer something new - here's a character portrait:

it might be just me, but when she runs, her body seem to be longer than the idle pose...
i realy like the portrait, reminds me of kingdom hearts com portrait style...

keep up the good work!

YW, Z!  (just glad I'm not coming across with too much!)

Tsk, tsk, wasting yer life on them viddyer games.  ;)

Also - Kingdom Hearts, really!  I don't know about the PS2 one, but Chain of Memories for the GBA has some of the best pixel art I've ever seen!  So please take it as a high compliment, and please change your mind about taking a look at its art, and please put in some of those doodles you mentioned!

Thanks.