this is almost precisely what I warned you against doing - I hope that is clear to you now because it's not working. Congratulations little rat, you've been zapped again!!
the motion you've arrived at is pretty complicated for an amateur. it's not reason not to try, but it's one of the main reason this doesn't work at all.
by working blindly you've added in far too many frames, ending up with a slow, wobbly swing.
in general, there are to types of attacks you want to make : fast attacks, and strong attacks. both use, in general, a single frame to bridge anticipation and recovery. the main difference is that strong attacks tend to be longer animations with more parts, particularly in recovery, but both really put most of the effort into the frames around the attack. you're doing the opposite here, putting very few frames into the start and end but giving us hat, three or four for the swing itself? the result is a very weak attack that doesn't look properly executed - because it isn't.
if there's one thing you should take from practicing these moves yourself, it's the ways you need to move prior to and after swinging. as I said before, the body does not skip steps, it only learns to do them faster.
also a note : we were always taught that a solid cannot be compressed (aside from the occasional reference, as happens with all impossibilities, to "unless you could focus the power of a billion suns...") so your ice bat idea is just....ice. the groovy/silly science fiction type solution would be to say that it's actually a chemical reaction in a controlled chamber (the handle) which is absorbing so much energy from the material around it, creating a type of energy vaccum that actually freezes solid the water vapor and other particles in the path of the intake, resulting in a constantly freezing and refreezing "bat" of cold and ice...
« Last Edit: January 25, 2009, 10:05:14 am by ndchristie »
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