Pixelation

Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: chungsie on August 03, 2017, 01:53:39 pm

Title: Mandrake walk animation
Post by: chungsie on August 03, 2017, 01:53:39 pm
Even though I have done pixel for 2 years, I still feel new to it all. I really have not followed any tutorials.

(http://i.imgur.com/ZYZ7RyW.gif)

anyways, your feedback is much appreciated.
Title: Re: Mandrake walk animation
Post by: eishiya on August 03, 2017, 02:07:24 pm
When animating, I recommend getting the animation down before you do any details, to avoid having to redraw a lot of stuff. In addition, your details are so noisy that they obscure the important stuff, like where the legs are exactly. In addition, you have so many details and layers of shading right now that keeping it consistent between frames is very difficult (and you're not managing it well). I recommend keeping the shading on animated characters simple to avoid this issue.

The legs seem to be sliding back and forth rather than moving as they do in a walk. The leg moving forward should be raised off the ground, the leg moving back should be planted on the ground. Both of your legs are planted on the ground. Even if you want more of a shuffle where the legs stay large on the ground, the motion of the leg differs depending on whether it's moving forward or not. There's no shortcut for this.

Even in a shuffling walk, the torso should bob up and down slightly, since the legs raise it higher when they're vertical. As-is, with the torso fixed in the frame, the legs appear to get longer when they're positioned forward or  back, since they're covering a longer diagonal distance in those frames, rather than the shorter vertical distance when they're underneath the torso.

When legs are underneath the torso, it's not the same as when the character is just standing! At that point, one leg is bent and moving forwards, and one is unbent (or bent less) and moving backwards. You cannot reuse the standing sprite for a walk cycle without it looking weird. Only very small sprites can get away with it because their legs are too stubby for this stuff to make a difference.

The shading seems to get darker for a frame. As I mentioned though, you may want to work on the animation without any shading (perhaps just with solid colours for each body part to distinguish them) until it's done and ready for colouring/detail work.


Edit: I find this (http://www.andrewnourse.com/images/walkacyle.jpg) to be a useful guide for animating humanoid walk cycles. The key frames in the image would make an 8-frame animation (notice that only half of the animation is shown, but the key points are the same for when the other leg moves forward), but you can merge certain key moments in the walk to make a cycle with fewer frames if you want to.
It's common for animations to merge the "pass" and "up" frames by using the body's position between those moments, resulting in a 6-frame animation. Four-frame animations keep just the contact and pass frames, and three-frame animations like those in RPG Maker have two contact frames and reuse a single "pass" frame where both legs are down on the ground.