You helped make this community the amazing place this it is! Thanks for that.

Hey, this is looking really nice. Love the look and feel of it. My only suggestion, is that the colors are all a little hazy, they look washed out. This could be due to a difference in the calibration of our monitors. Here is what I mean:



If the left side looks too murky, then it's probably the monitors.

Wow, thanks PPD. Your post really illuminated some concepts I only had inklings about.

There's a couple things about the run.
I think its that the green line on her shorts is mostly suspended on the y axis.
The knee also seems to have the same thing going on.
Also the foot while on the ground slows down from the spacing.

Good catch on that. I tried to fix it up. I made her knee raise up more before extending, I think it makes the run more dynamic. Not sure if I completely resolved the issues however.

I hope you are somewhat kidding here.

Half kidding. I see that you didn't invent this technique, but its application here was really effective and all I could do was basically the same thing.

Here is a running jump animation I'm working on. I don't like how the legs come together in the landing, but I'm not quite sure what to do with them.

Hey Zizka. I like your guy, he's cool. I did a pretty rough animation edit. I think you should be a little more bold in deforming and moving the different parts of your character. In my edit I tried to make a bigger wind up to the throw. I did so by moving his body more, and keeping the movement on his arm on its own trajectory, not locked to the movement of the body. If I was going to make this into a complete thing, I would probably take it even farther.

Another thing I would do, would be to keep the animation moving after he throws the bone. Right now, he locks up while the bone is moving. As he throws, he puts weight on his front leg, bending it. After releasing the bone, he should rebound from this impact, and continue that reverse momentum into standing up normally. His throwing arm should have some follow through after he releases the bone.

Speaking of weight, try to picture where the weight of his body is. In yours, he puts all the weight on his back foot as he winds up, then it slides back as he throws. This takes a lot of energy out of the throw. In mine, that foot with the weight on it stays planted, pushing his body forward with the throw.

I feel like the advancing technology has created an illusion of continuous "improvement" in graphics. The assumption is that graphics were always trying to approach something that looked realistic, but the technology was holding that back. As technology improved, artists were able to move closer to this ideal. I simply don't think this is the case, and I think that people who consider pixel art to be simple nostalgia or retro are confusing the advancing of the technology with the improvement of the art.  In fact, I think if computers sprung forth with the capacity for complex realistic 3D graphics from the start, pixel art (or something like it) would still exist. That's because the computer screen is made of pixels, their manipulation and mastery is inevitable. Higher level techniques that obfuscate them (anti-aliasing and such) are secondary.