Just a couple of work in progress animations. Please let me know what you think!


Very quick idle animation. I'm not happy with this, the fluttering is too fine and fast. Lacks any sort of secondary anim too.


Just put together a 4-frame fall animation.  The character will be dropping during this animation. This needs more work,and I would tween this to 8 frames once it is ready. That rear leg is pretty bad, come to think of it... o_o

Apologies for the scruffiness of these images - my work tends to start off rather messy until I'm happy with how it flows.

It either means you're a lousy animator, an awesome animator or a crippled animator.

The first if you don't care about your end product and thus don't need a smooth workflow

The second if you do all the good animation in your head and thus don't need a smooth workflow.

The third if you ACTUALLY would benefit from easy flipping-through frames, not meddling with showing/hiding layers on and off all the time, onion skin, etc, thus DO need a smoother workflow : D

Jus kidding though, you're probably just used to it. But yes, for me it's weird because I feel crippled when I try it; I'm no photoshop junkie in the first place, so everything just feels awkward. Actually having to click my way through frames and trying to keep track of which layer is which frame makes me go more or less mad. But if that's part of your workflow, you're cool : D

But it does seem weird to me!

It's pretty likely that I'm not doing enough sprite work to feel crippled by Photoshop. I don't do sprite stuff very often, and I'm pretty handy with photoshop so I find other 2D software a bit of a nuisance to get around unless I'm committed to it (like Manga Studio, for example)!

I suspect that I could work faster, and sometimes I do hate some things about imageready. For example, to click through animation frames I actually have an 'action' setup so that my F6 and F7 keys act as 'previous frame' and 'next frame', and that's not perfect because it doesn't select the correct layer for editing.  So yeah, I suppose I am crippled in this respect.

That said, there is plenty that I do love about photoshop's animation system. I like that I can move layers around to quickly test new objects (such as quickly create a static hat layer, and nudge it so that it bobs with the head). I also like that it supports anti-aliasing, as this is often important for stuff I do.

It's not like I do pixels every day though, like you guys! ^_^

Jad, that's really helpful advice. I'll see if I can do something with her dress. I have a wind blowing for her idle right now that ripples through the hem of the dress, and I think that sort of feedback can be effective. My next animation is a 'falling' animation, which will plume quite heavily (though I'm avoiding it lifting up, of course! o_o)

Thanks for the feedback so far, I'll definitely poke around with this sprite and see if I can spruce it up.

The palette isn't settled on just yet, it will really depend on how it looks with the background. I think I might introduce a hint of colour into her dress.

Turbo, do you agree about the facing direction?