AuthorTopic: Urge for Help :(  (Read 2524 times)

Offline Fieldren

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Urge for Help :(

on: May 07, 2017, 03:16:27 am
Hello everybody, i've been trying to animate my character and i can't make a proper idle animation...
I've been struggling like hell to get the right positions but it seems that i'm not able to do it.



I've read all kinds of articles, videos and tutorials but i'm just plain bad animating.

Can you please help me with this one? If you do it you will lend a huge hand for me.
I want to know what am i doing wrong and obviously what i need to do to fix my mistakes.
If you doodle something i would be very grateful.

Thanks for your time guys, and girls.
Praise the sun \[T]/

Offline 32

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Re: Urge for Help :(

Reply #1 on: May 07, 2017, 08:37:27 am
You need to think in cycles. Look up the basic animation cycles and practice them. Bouncing Ball and Pendulum will be particularly helpful for this animation. Breathing is a very basic, slow back and forth between two states. You need to identify and create two "key frames," one at each extreme of the motion. Once you have those it's just a matter of creating frames that blend between those two.

Stand up and breathe, as deeply and as exaggerated as you can and concentrate on what your body is doing. Look in a mirror if it helps.

Animate the whole character, right now he's a torso bouncing on a pair of legs. Depending on what you want the idle to be consider having him bounce at the knees a little. If it is a breathing only animation make sure that you are blending convincingly between the moving and unmoving portions of the sprite, this blending should happen around the height of the diaphragm.

Offline Fieldren

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Re: Urge for Help :(

Reply #2 on: May 07, 2017, 02:03:17 pm
Thank you very much ,32.

Going to work towards your advice, though i've been trying to follow the 2 key frames-step, it keeps being hard to me to make it work. Will post progress.

Thank you ,Treinta y dos.
Praise the sun \[T]/

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Urge for Help :(

Reply #3 on: May 07, 2017, 09:09:57 pm
Hola! te habla un Colombiano que lleva animando bastante tiempo.


What 32 told you is great, it helps understand what you need to know. just be easier on yourself.

First of all,  the animation isnt as bad as you think. He breathes in 2 different ways, that is more complicated than many many games which are actually professional, dont sweat it so much. Nobody is going to buy a game and then throw it in the trashcan because they didnt like the breathing of the character.

Second. Dont animate sprites that are the best you can do. animate sprites that are really easy for you, (maybe animate sprites like your avatar which are far more simple) that way you can focus on the animation.

Edit: I read on another topic you drew animations by making several still frames in photoshop and then sticking them together? that is an insane way to learn animation. Learning to animate like that is like learning to draw by hammering a nail on to a rock. You need to be able to draw while seeing how one frame goes to the next one to understand animation. Get something that has onionskin function (onionskin is seeing a transparent version of the previous frame on top of the one you have, that way you know which way to move the animation).
Some people animate on photoshop, but I think they are insane. I use graphics gale, a lot of people use ASEprite  and Pyxel edit which costs less $$$, so they might be good but but I have only really used graphicsgale, so ask someone who does use those programs :p.

I imagine  you've read 20 tutorials before you got to working on 1 animation, that makes you expect an animation 20 times better than what you can make, so dont do that. Drawing something and seeing that it sucks hurts, so you delay that moment of drawing something that sucks by watching 20 tutorials, hoping once you have watched them what will come out will not suck, but that doesnt happen. What happens is after watching the 20 tutorials, you can draw something maybe 1.2 times better but now you expect something 20 times better. Start an animation with what you know, invest atleast half an hour on it and then if you dont know how to fix it go look for a tutorial, or ask advice here on the part on which you cant fix. Learning animation is hard, this happens to everyone.

Also, not every tutorial is good, a lot of tutorials just give shitty tricks that are cheats that work for the person who made them, not something that works for everyone, so dont think you suck if the tutorial doesnt make you better, it may be the tutorial that sucks.

What you have learnt is great, even if what you draw really doesnt look that great to you. Tutorials try to make principles look easy and make you think you can do exactly what the tutorial does after you finish watching it, that is very very far from the truth.

Animators who can do this easily look like they always knew how to do it, but they didnt always know it, some time they struggled with it too, but nobody likes a tutorial that says that learning is hard. Also the person making the tutorial probably learnt a long time ago  and they forgot that it was hard once.

Think of it like this, the first person who taught this had to discover the principle all alone, and that was really hard. You want to do this easily because you know that every animator out there already knows what you're trying to learn, but knowing that doesnt actually make learning the principle easier, watching a video that says what the principle is doesnt make it easy either, that teaches you to say what the principle is, but what you need is to be able to draw showing what the principle is, which is a lot harder. Learning something is more like discovering the principle the first time than already knowing it, so dont think  it will be as easy as watching and doing.
« Last Edit: May 07, 2017, 09:56:56 pm by Conzeit »

Offline Fieldren

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Re: Urge for Help :(

Reply #4 on: May 08, 2017, 02:01:23 am
Everytime i come here, i expect a little bit of help, a bit of interest, but when i stumble with replies like this, it just blow my mind.

Maybe ,for some people here it is not as important to have a quality advice, but when you are all alone doing a project just by yourself , you need replies like this, the only thing you need, is help like this.

THANK YOU GUYS, thanks for your time, you two are great dudes.

Praise the sun \[T]/