Reads more like he is throwing a frisbee than a heavy attack.
If its a palm attack why not start by lifting the front leg, step in, then cross the rear arm forward (pull other arm back)?
Kinda like this
(http://www.sendo-ryu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/clip-image004.jpg)
^ That would be far more powerful than the strange bitch-slap he is doing now :lol:
So 1st is electric palm attack, 2nd and 3rd are knife attack which is the same colour as electric palm? :huh:
1st and 2nd are OK but 3rd just looks wrong to me.
I have two complaints. The first is that most of your characters look the same,Cnut with different hairstyles, costumes and heights. Palette variation is a good cue for differentiation, and silhouette comes just as important.
For the animation, I see very little commitment to the attack from the character's body. Typically before a forward movement there is a windup to gain momentum. I would have his arm bent until the second half of the swing, and definitely get his body and legs more involved.
Hey Rosier
I'm not sure if you intend this to be a game character or not. If it's supposed to be, I think they main issue with the animations is that it starts off in a very stiff pose. It would be very weird if you ran around and than suddenly stopped to an halt to do the motion in your animation. I would try to put a bit more power into it with more anticipation.
I'm definatly not an expert in animation but I would do something like this instead:
(http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj114/johanaronson/Drifter_ani_zps3115b0f6.gif)
More movement could possibly be done but I have little time, someone here could probably make this a little more interesting! I've also changed a few of the features and since you're going
for a HLD style I would make the colours stand out more as individual spots. Right now it's a little to dark and messy.
Good luck!
yours:
(http://i.imgur.com/FwSdPM8.gif)
mine:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v84/aceallen/r3fSnIO-1.gif)
I duplicated frame 11 and tweaked it to show you what I'm referring to about adding power to your animation. Note how on frame 11 it moves up+back into the distance before going forward with the beginnings of the strike motion (in your original, there was simply a straight-forward lunge with zero anticipation there.) Other than that 1 additional frame I added, the only other tweak I made was on frame 14 to make the hand movement/spacing correct with the anticipation frame I added.
As far as Pixel Pile Driver's stuff, I learned animation way back on the old pixelation (RIP the Bruce Lee banner. ;P) before I knew of him, so I don't have any links to his work, though it shouldn't be too hard to find. He's got a little website with a lot of animation tutorials. Just google him.
As for colors, I have zero talent other than washed out. You mind if I touch on your palette?
QuoteAs for colors, I have zero talent other than washed out. You mind if I touch on your palette?
I see you went ahead, but yeah that's absolutely no problem : P
I cannot think of much criticism, but I will say that I absolutely love the palette and style. Also, maybe those blue pixels on his feet aren't very necessary? I dunno but they just don't look right to me.
I actually kinda like the lit up boots. It's a small thing, but I feel like it adds a bit of character to the animation without being too distracting.
While I like this, and think it's fairly solid, I think you could definitely make the upper body more expressive while he's charging up. He does a really quick motion with his left arm, but then he just sticks it down by his side and it becomes dead weight, which seems kind of odd to me. I would think if he were gathering energy, he would show it in more ways than just a bright blue ball, maybe by drawing himself in, or shifting a little to the side.
Although, I don't really understand the personality of this character, so that non-telegraphed sort of motion might be appropriate?
Also, I have mixed feelings on the palette change. I feel like the blue on his coat is a bit too saturated, although I like that the purple is pulled out a little bit more. And I'm not sure if it's because of the palette change or if you actually changed the frames, but the blur feels toned down, and the impact looks weaker because of it.
Anyways. I'm pretty new to spriting and animation myself, so take everything I say with a couple grains of salt, but I hope at least some of what I said was helpful!
All this is due to his body position during animation. He is to stiff. Through all this edits you are trying to improve it by adding small details, but you can't make it perfect until you improve base. Every good artist should be capable to destroy his work in order to create something better from it. I know that sometimes that can be hard (very hard) to do, but by doing this you are making big step forward.
For me he somehow it looks like he's uninterested and bored, "let's get over with this already" posture.Because he's supposed to. His character is emotionless and bored.
A couple frames seem off in placement and speed.
They are working against the motion.
Sorry no time for edits or explaining.
Consider looking over the frame times and positions again.
A stun?
A combo starter?
A combo linker?
A combo ender?
A one off power move?
Can it be used in more than one context?
If you told me this was some sort of mid power attack that stuns enemies with a shock for 3-5 seconds, I'd believe it.
If you told me this was his heavy attack... I would probably want something more out of it.
Surely a guy this cool has another trick/knife/sword/thing that is more flashy and powerful.
The issue is, with the added time to draw in the energy visually, it seems to zap some energy from the attack itself -- nobody's gonna take that long to execute an attack, and if they did, that wind-up better be epic after the energy is drawn in visually, or it loses power (as you should be able to see now).
One thing that stands out to me as rather odd is the limpness of the left arm. It might help if he used it for counterbalance, bending at the elbow, for example.
Any particular reason for the crouch? It seems a bit extraneous for putting on armor.
I'd also bring the arms up into a more pronounced pose if I were you, perhaps by putting the body in the form of an 'X' sort of pose to emphasize the energy. Atm, the whole animation just looks like you put a lot of frames in there, but none have any real speed or sense of impact (major problem with most oldschool disney animations for example.)
Anime is an excellent example of how to counter the failings of Disney since they've honed the technique of very high-impact actions with very low frame counts. You seem to be falling into the Disney trap here unfortunately, with high frame counts to cover up your weak keyframe poses. Anime focuses on strong and dynamic keyframe poses, and only adds in the number of inbetweens necessary to convey that pose convincingly. In effect, the original keyframes are choppy and move sharply from one to the next, but proper spacing in your movements can cover up the seeming 'need' for more frames.
While the action occurring is interesting - the way it plays out feels very undynamic - it's merely a monotonously spaced sequence of movements. There's no force, no vigor.
Stand up and follow through with that same action. Don't you want to make it really snappy and interesting? Vary speeds. Let a slight pause of anticipation happen before a prominent movement and execute the movement with no ease in, but but give it a slight ease out.
What you have is a nice rough draft. You've chosen a concept and you've got the choreography established. Now add some exaggeration, some eccentricity to it. Make it fun to watch.
Try that exercise, try making an animation with better rhythm without tweaking the frame delay.Just to add to that:
why do they all have white hair?
The transition from the squatting to the running is a little awkward. I'm thinking you need to make her turn her body to the side as she squats.
For the actual running itself, it seems too fast. If you want to keep this speed, it might be a good idea to push the body and head a little more front so that there's more weight pulling her forward.
I don't understand why the hand punches upwards when she stands.
If she's supposed to be using the momentum of her run to jump and thrust upwards, she's losing a lot of that momentum when turning towards the camera. Is the palm thrust supposed to be an attack? Why not a punch?
If she's supposed to be using the momentum of her run to jump and thrust upwards, she's losing a lot of that momentum when turning towards the camera. Is the palm thrust supposed to be an attack? Why not a punch?
The intention was that she slid to be facing the front, but putting too many sliding frames would take too long. I suppose that could be fixed if I ever go back to this.
And it's a palm strike because an open hand looks a heck of a lot better than a fist when pointed upwards.
Pretty interesting you're inspired by hyper light drifter, with its high contrast neon palettes when yours are so flat and grey. When you don't have any shading or outline separating your forms, you might have to push the contrast a bit. (Yeah, it does look better in motion, especially with the relatively high frame rate but it certainly can't hurt).
Besides that, the pose looks pretty weird. His legs look small, his body looks long and leaning back, and he has no neck. It's pretty confusing to look at - the highest contrast on the sprite is the least important detail. I would drop that diagonal belt thing all together, but maybe make it 2px wide and dark green otherwise.
It's also a lot smaller than the original sprite.
if the intention is to further your artistic prowess, following the dimensions of a single sprite in a single game so much as to ignore jarring oddities in a character's pose will not help you in that regard. just try to fix it.
Fizzick means HLD being the single game you're restricting (/excusing) yourself with. Latest edit is an improvement, but it still looks like his short legs are running away from him. Don't have this issue with the Zelda 2 sprite or Smash Bros gif you linked to.
Maybe it'd help if you explained what is it about HLD you're inspired by? Assume it's not the exact sprite dimensions? Just general rendering style with solids? IMO all the really special stuff about HLD is design stuff, so there's not much of interest left if you switch all the design stuff with a different character's. But there's still plenty of style-guide type stuff you're skipping, if that's something you want to explore further (eyes, general anatomy shape, thinner limbs etc). If I saw your Links now I would sooner think of a 1980s arcade game than Hyper Light Drifter, like Jungle King or something.