Pose to pose animation
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26702
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 2:28pm
Topic: Pose to pose animation
Posted By: imonk
Subject: Pose to pose animation
Date Posted: 23 August 2019 at 2:24pm
| Is animating a character from one pose to another just a lot of trial and error? I think I'm okay at drawing characters now, but taking an existing character and manipulating their body into another pose can sometimes take a while. Idle animations are easy, however things that usually involve a lot of limb and spine rotation can be tricky. For example if I draw a sword swing pose sometimes I'll get the sword and arm proportions right, but forget to tilt the legs and torso first. Thanks for reading! 😊 |
Replies:
Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 09 September 2019 at 4:16am
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Books / tutorials / training about traditional animation (cartoon) can help a lot. In an animation, what's important is that the movement flows well, not that each frame is pixel-perfect.
For low-detail sprites, instead of working with the outlines, you'll often design and check animation with flat filled colors. After you have checked that the movement plays nice, is time to add pixel-level details. At this step, it is possible to introduce mistake because the details interfere with readability, so be ready to step back and keep things simple. Note that in traditional animation they usually have a constraint of a fixed time step (ex: 12 or 24 images/s). On the computer you are more free, so you can always split a time interval and insert an intermediate frame. |
Posted By: imonk
Date Posted: 12 September 2019 at 10:55pm
Thanks, I've learned a lot about animation on my own recently and I had fun. 1. It takes long 2. GET THOSE KEY FRAMES! 3. To start new poses, rough out the big shapes until your brain can tell what's going on with the motion. Then "carve" the big shapes until all the line work is mostly in proportion. Now you can finally do the long daunting part, add the details flipping back and forth between frames, THEN start on your "tweens". In other words, there's no secret. 
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