Animation as it develops

[alarid0]

I don't know if this will be helpful to anyone else diving into pixel art or not...
But that's the driving force behind this post.

If anyone was curious as to how I build up my animations I'll post as I go with this sprite set.

I'm told that just seeing the full left/right/up/down animations that I did with the white body and gray shades helped a few people out more than any other tutorial they could find...maybe this can assist a few people once it fully develops too.

(And then of course if you spot anything wrong with the flow of it so far, by all means point it out ^_^;; )



Explanation stuff...since I'm turning this into a half tutorial ha
To make the animation match I drew frame by frame right next to the original, but just one arm and leg. Then I copied those and set each one ahead by 5 since its a 10 frame loop (the frame 1 left leg is the frame 6 right leg, frame 2 left arm is the frame 7 right arm etc) that way each side gets identical but opposite movement. As for the timing and visual weight of the individual leg going back and forward...that just took a lot of tweaking and gaging at certain points where the leg should be at certain increments (where should the leg be 1/2 way through? where should it be 1/4 through?)

[Darklux]

This is absolutely awesome.
Do you use a Ragdoll to learn about the movements?

[alarid0]

By now I've just managed to have done enough walking animation cycles from scratch over the years (and...nothing but those...I've always wound up stopping after the basic movement :/ ) that I don't end up looking at anything for reference anymore. (it would probably be best if I did anyways though..)
When I started I just paced back and forth around my house looking down watching my arms and legs and trying to make note of where everything should be at each quarter of the entire motion.
It involved a lot of walking, running back to my computer, tweaking a few things, realizing I had it wrong, walking again, running back, etc etc

I'm going to end up doing the same thing for any of the other motions i need to do; swinging weapons, jumping, I don't know..whatever comes up.

(side note... hmm.. his right shoulder seems to have a lot more motion than the left...)

[Darklux]

It may sound odd, but look out for some movies with chasing scenes or similar stuff, maybe you can learn about movement there too.

Ittl only be hard to ignore the action and just care about movements, lol.

[alarid0]

movies would be amazing...if...i could isolate the movement ^_^;;
loop a few brief moments of the same continuous motion...yeah...
otherwise its presented and gone before you have a chance to fully study it

but if we're only talking about running here i could just be a creep, go down to the gym and stare at the people on the treadmills haha

[MrAnonymous_P2P]

The feet don't come up as smoothly as I would like, and that is challenging being an(Amateur) Animation Artist atm.

edit: btw I am talking about the very tip of the heel, you will notice in the last few frames it just jumps at you.

[alarid0]

Originally Posted by MrAnonymous_P2P

The feet don't come up as smoothly as I would like, and that is challenging being an(Amateur) Animation Artist atm.

edit: btw I am talking about the very tip of the heel, you will notice in the last few frames it just jumps at you.

Oh, you mean in the one looking directly forward? yeaaahhh... I've noticed that... but I've never been annoyed with it enough to change anything. Is it big enough to go in and fix it? If ever there's a time to do it, now's it




Also I just remembered something. This is a bit of work I started...hmm.. probably January of this year? I figure a non human figure done in the same manner is relevant enough to all this

I'm not even fully confident about the movement itself and how truly spiderlike it is, but it's close enough to look good. For this I did a lot of searching for some sort of reference, and wound up finding a 4 second clip that I watched over and over of a bunch of computer generated untextured spiders walking around on a surface. Its the same process of getting one of the directions done and then forming a "3d" frame of movement as you can see in all the light purple (and some tan) lines around it.


I had an image with this direction completed somewhere...hm...oh well.
Its not pixel art with all the brush work and rotating I did with the legs but there aren't too many cases where thats much of an issue. I was going to just have a handful of basic parts that I would make for each spider and have a photoshop action set to automatically rotate them into each frame for my wonderful little arachnid... That way I could veery quickly make new spider designs from start to finish like this one

[Vimerge]

they're lovely

[DustyPorViva]

About walking movies, dunno if anyone knows but when they made the first Prince of Persia, he recorded his little brother doing lots of stuff so that he could study the movement. Look on Youtube or something for the video.
Also, that neon glowing spider looks damn hot.

[Tom]

wow...

[Stephen]

Alarid's work is always impractically detailed, but the quality shows in his end results.

[BigBear3]

Skills <3

[alarid0]

Originally Posted by Stephen

Alarid's work is always impractically detailed, but the quality shows in his end results.

i have issues with an inability to hold myself back...(when i do get down to work that is)

anyways i was gone for thanksgiving stuff and then recording in some studio over in iowa with my band but heyyy im back now. should i keep posting updates for this?

[Crono]

Originally Posted by alarid0

should i keep posting updates for this?

Why not?