Furthermore 100% of the time animations look better when they have overlapping action which means parts that move at different speeds.
Hmm thats interesting, I thought that everything that was animating had to be in in sync with the rest of the animation, just goes to show how much I know about animation haha.
Anywho, I am animating with a program called gamemaker (and no, Im not using it to make games, however I used to back when it was v5-6ish, so it is familiar to me) and creating the GIF's using
http://gickr.com/ . First I draw an individual part of the animation (such as the breathing motion of the chest in my latest animation) in MS paint constantly loading small updates into gamemaker and then move onto the next individual part. rinse and repeat, I just find it easier that way.
Why shouldnt I mind having a sonic advance-esk hair animation? I prefer the stiff-ness of the hair (and ofcourse I could try to create "stiff-ness" aswell as having an animation as mentioned above in my update). But if you have a good reason as to why I should have floppy hair
Would just like to clarify something here, by "straight ahead" do you mean straight forward or simple? If so I dont understand your complaint having to "constantly flip back and forth in order to figure out where the hair was going.." Is that not a normal process then, could you maybe explain what you mean a little more?
Which graphics application are you using to load and save GIF animations, maybe i could use it too.
EDIT: Even though i disagree with having hair-motion for my sprite, here, I am the student and so I made the hair move in the animation (but i did it with suttlety, i think).
I followed the frames from yours and beefmo's hair animations, only i did not make changes to the hair between each frame as drastic.
Edit2:
After playing a little with the hair (i.e. sticking the above hair animation on my idle-sword animation) I noticed that for that animation it looked really quite good but for the generic idle animation it looked pretty poor, curious as to why this was ocurring, I compared the 6 individual frames of both animations paying particular attention to the hair. After a few seconds I realized that the in the generic animation there was a "1 frame delay" in motion compared to the idle-sword animation, and decided to remedy that. I believe it now looks how it should but I am interested in what you guys think (just checking that Im not losing my marbles here
)
original:
edit:
I suppose, the hair moving isnt so bad. Its actually kind of growing on me (especially on the idle-sword animation, now it looks 10x as awesome as it did
).
Thanks!