Sprinting Animation
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: Pixel Art
Forum Name: WIP (Work In Progress)
Forum Discription: Get crits and comments on your pixel WIPs and other art too!
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=25257
Printed Date: 09 September 2025 at 3:47am
Topic: Sprinting Animation
Posted By: Reix
Subject: Sprinting Animation
Date Posted: 05 July 2016 at 9:21pm
WIP Sprinting animation. Recently added the hair motion, but I'm wondering about how to shade the ponytail and such. |
Replies:
Posted By: mkd
Date Posted: 05 July 2016 at 10:11pm
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Overall I like it. The drawing & colors are good. I'm not sure to be good enough in animation to give advice... But I see two things that maybe could enhance this: - the hair tail could be lighter & more flexible, and move a little more like an oscilloscope  - The girl's upper body could have more torsion. So when the right arm is in front, the right shoulder would be more in front. |
Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 06 July 2016 at 6:24pm
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. |
Posted By: RebeaLeion
Date Posted: 07 July 2016 at 4:42am
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I like 1st hair, this moves bit a like tail.
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Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 08 July 2016 at 3:37pm
| 1st as in the first draft, or 1st as in the one on the 1st post? I'm a bit confused. |
Posted By: mkd
Date Posted: 09 July 2016 at 4:42am
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I think the first one (posted in this topic) is better. But the second wasn't a bad idea (it's quite close to what I thought with oscilloscope motion, so I understand why you posted it), just not enough well done, not feeling natural enough. |
Posted By: GameBoy
Date Posted: 09 July 2016 at 10:34am
| I prefer first version too. Feels more natural. |
Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 09 July 2016 at 11:09am
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Oscillating hair moves kind of like a snake - it moves through an imaginary tunnel, so the apparent bends stay static (relative to the WORLD, not relative to the character) and the hair "slithers" through it. Because you're animating the character in place, this is difficult to pull off compared to if you were drawing the character actually moving. Having imaginary balls move along the hair at the speed the character is meant to be moving (so, if the character were moving instead, the balls would appear static) will allow you to approximate this effect and have natural-looking oscillation. Mind you, this isn't how hair actually works in reality because real hair is a mess of many individual strands rather than a solid mass, this is just a method that tends to give very natural-feeling results. |
Posted By: Damian
Date Posted: 09 July 2016 at 11:19am
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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  .
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Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 09 July 2016 at 3:48pm
Made the arms extend a bit more rather than fold inward, moved the impact of the feet inward, raised the knees up, and added some torso movement. I'm just going to keep the hair for now, because I cannot fathom how I'm supposed to do the ball thing with movement added and make it look good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BmtGNjm7BE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH-3cHxXAK0 I was pointed to the first vid, which led me to the second, which are pretty good at showing off sprinting. |
Posted By: RebeaLeion
Date Posted: 11 July 2016 at 1:44pm
| Animations looks very nice. How long did you animate this piece? |
Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 11 July 2016 at 6:20pm
| The original draft, which looked quite a bit worse and more like a skipping jog, probably took about... 3-4 hours? Something like that. The next that turned more run like was more around 1-2, and then after that it was mostly minor changes and then experimenting with the ponytail, none of which took more than an hour. |
Posted By: RebeaLeion
Date Posted: 12 July 2016 at 6:06am
| wow thats fast, I do this stuff 7-8 hours and it looks wrong all the time x_X keep up animating ! |
Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 15 July 2016 at 5:16pm
Thanks!
Anyway, I've pretty much finished it aside from corrections. Not 100% sure on the chest, but otherwise I think it's pretty much done. |
Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 15 July 2016 at 7:37pm
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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. |
Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 15 July 2016 at 10:05pm
High up. I've lowered them and lessened the bounce, but I feel like the torso would be too static if there was nothing going on. Also made it so the torso kind of turns, because it wasn't before. |
Posted By: Damian
Date Posted: 16 July 2016 at 4:24am
| 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. |
Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 16 July 2016 at 7:15am
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The torso turning could make up for a lack of bounce, though a small amount of bounce in the right place could be fine. It's still hard to tell what's going on because you seem to have a highlight where there should be shadow under the breasts. |
Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 16 July 2016 at 5:52pm
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. |
Posted By: GameBoy
Date Posted: 22 July 2016 at 12:59am
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Legs animation is really weird. It's like you looped first half of frames twice, my brain just can't see the full cycle of animation. Also I think you should make her left leg darker, because honestly I don't know which one is left and which one is right. Maybe left arm too. Torso, head and hair are looking good. |
Posted By: Oriathelus
Date Posted: 22 July 2016 at 7:23am
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Originally posted by GameBoy
Legs animation is really weird. It's like you looped first half of frames twice, my brain just can't see the full cycle of animation. Also I think you should make her left leg darker, because honestly I don't know which one is left and which one is right. Maybe left arm too.Torso, head and hair are looking good. 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. |
Posted By: Oriathelus
Date Posted: 22 July 2016 at 7:26am
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Oh, and if you see, the shorts of your character follows the same that these running animations I posted above, the left leg, the one in the back plane, is darker than the one in the front plane.
Try to do the same with the legs and shoes. |
Posted By: Reix
Date Posted: 22 July 2016 at 5:10pm
Makes sense. Darkened the back leg and arm, so hopefully that made it a bit clearer. |
Posted By: Oriathelus
Date Posted: 22 July 2016 at 9:25pm
It's better, no doubt. 
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