[WIP] Chibi Platform Game Character [UPDATE - 29 March 2010]

[Atnas]

That's like a half step but totally a step in the right direction. If you're going to add that little snap! make sure you add some vertical bounce/sink to it, so there's an emphasized motion to go with the pause! otherwise the snap makes him look robotic ahaha : D

[CodeCriminal]

- Bump for update

Thank you all for your C+C I look forward to more

[Mike]

I think you shouldn't mind that it looks like Sonic's idle from Sonic Advance.  Furthermore 100% of the time animations look better when they have overlapping action which means parts that move at different speeds.





Btw how are you exporting these into animated gifs and yet you can't animate gifs themselves?  I can't imagine you have an easy time doing straight ahead animations like I did on the pony tail and now this idle.  I have to constantly flip back and forth in order to figure out where the hair was going and where it came from.

[CodeCriminal]

Furthermore 100% of the time animations look better when they have overlapping action which means parts that move at different speeds.

Hmm thats interesting, I thought that everything that was animating had to be in in sync with the rest of the animation, just goes to show how much I know about animation haha.
Anywho, I am animating with a program called gamemaker (and no, Im not using it to make games, however I used to back when it was v5-6ish, so it is familiar to me) and creating the GIF's using  http://gickr.com/ . First I draw an individual part of the animation (such as the breathing motion of the chest in my latest animation) in MS paint constantly loading small updates into gamemaker and then move onto the next individual part. rinse and repeat, I just find it easier that way.

Why shouldnt I mind having a sonic advance-esk hair animation? I prefer the stiff-ness of the hair (and ofcourse I could try to create "stiff-ness" aswell as having an animation as mentioned above in my update). But if you have a good reason as to why I should have floppy hair

Would just like to clarify something here, by "straight ahead" do you mean straight forward or simple? If so I dont understand your complaint having to "constantly flip back and forth in order to figure out where the hair was going.." Is that not a normal process then, could you maybe explain what you mean a little more?

Which graphics application are you using to load and save GIF animations, maybe i could use it too.

EDIT: Even though i disagree with having hair-motion for my sprite, here, I am the student and so I made the hair move in the animation (but i did it with suttlety, i think).
I followed the frames from yours and beefmo's hair animations, only i did not make changes to the hair between each frame as drastic.


Edit2:
After playing a little with the hair (i.e. sticking the above hair animation on my idle-sword animation) I noticed that for that animation it looked really quite good but for the generic idle animation it looked pretty poor, curious as to why this was ocurring, I compared the 6 individual frames of both animations paying particular attention to the hair. After a few seconds I realized that the in the generic animation there was a "1 frame delay" in motion compared to the idle-sword animation, and decided to remedy that. I believe it now looks how it should but I am interested in what you guys think (just checking that Im not losing my marbles here )

original:

edit:


I suppose, the hair moving isnt so bad. Its actually kind of growing on me (especially on the idle-sword animation, now it looks 10x as awesome as it did ).

Thanks!

[Mike]

I use Graphics Gale and sometimes I use pro-motion but I'll use anything that has onion skinning.  I'm not as fluent with pro-motion though when I use that program I become very clumsy.  I used to use Multimedia Fusion 2 for my animations because it uses onion skin and without it it's very hard to keep things accurate and animate with confidence.

And what I mean by straight ahead is not an insult at all lol.  I mean straight ahead as opposed to pose to pose animation.  Straight ahead animation means you have no guide frames whatsoever and just animate all willy nilly until you come up with something, for example.  Did you ever use the edges of a page to animate something, that is straight ahead basically.



That is a straight ahead animation and it's especially easy to tell that because this run is 14 frames meaning each step is 7 frames.  This is not at all how I would normally do it but I was just messing around with Flipnote studios on my DSi and that's how it turned out.  I started from the first frame and just kept moving forward.  Although after reaching frame 7 I realized I was done with a step so then I could use those frames to reference when drawing the next 7 frames. 

However I don't suggest doing runs or walks or cycles like how I did, on the other hand you primarily use straight ahead animation for things you can't predict like the movement of hair and other loose bits of the character.

Oh and I'm think you should keep your characters hair floppy because it makes more sense and is more appealing to look at it.  With animation you always want to be experiencing change otherwise it becomes lifeless.

Even a character with seemingly thick hair has a lot of bounce.




This is extremely slow in Firefox lol but still my point stands, you can see very nice movement in the hair even though it would seem very stiff. 

Here is a handy list of rules that you can check off one by one in order to make your animation more "Full"

http://frankanollie.com/PhysicalAnimation.html

[CodeCriminal]

@Mike - I downloaded both graphics gale and pro motion and neither of them will let me load/save gifs without purchasing the full version, however the onion skinning is nice and I have used it before (a while back i think) so for animation I will probably continue to use graphics gale, but for shading and such I will just stick with paint for now (until I get used to graphics gale and then will probably move over to it).
straight ahead thingy - Ah! glad we cleared that up

I've decided to keep my characters hair animation, if you could check the post before this i made a slight edit to the hair and explain what I did and why.
The reason that characters hair in the animation you posted seems stiff is because it doesnt bend like the hair on my character, thats the only difference, if it bent from the tip to the root it would seem just as floppy. I could try not-bending my characters but I think I've fooled around enough with the Idle animations and I should really start moving forwards I have alot of work to do.

Thanks for the link, bookmarked

Ok, so yeah, now the reply is out the way, I've been working on another run cycle in graphics gale trying to animate a sprint. At the moment it has no arms, because everything I tried sucked, but I will try, try and try again with the aid of the past and future posts here .
(ok maybe its not quite a sprint, but thats fine.. All I really want is advice on how to pollish it up some more)
I think I hit the mark and followed what people had said, then again I thought my first running animation was ok but everyone seems to be able to find flaws in it so I'm posting this one here to be judged and ridiculed.
Once I get the sprint animation down I will try and translate it to my actual sprite. After thats done I have jumping, attacking, climbimg, and so on. So yeah lots of work+learning to be done, expect more updates until the whole sheet is finished.

[Mike]

That run...dude...it's perfect...nearly.  I think their needs to be more vertical bounce.  When he is off the ground you can really exaggerate how much air he gets.  Right now the bounce seems a bit too little.  That amount of bounce is usually for a walking woman.  So says Richards Williams that is.  The energy is good and the spacing is good and it totally fits with your character.  I see nothing you need to change about the overall movement.  Because you didn't start with everything you are free to have the arms however you want.  You could even have him dragging his sword.

The best part about this animation is how well the feet follow arcs, you can really see and feel the rotation of the feet as he runs.  Some may say you need more in-betweens but I think right now from what I can see it looks great.  Are you going to make this game in Game maker?  Because I make all my games in a similar program called Multimedia Fusion 2(cost money) nothing wrong with it I say.

Oh and the approach you took on animating the hair is a nice compromise PLUS it will be easier to animate the character overall if you keep the flowy bits movement to a minimum.

Anyway looking forward to seeing more!!

[rvzero]

You could try Jasc Animation Shop.
It's old but (should be) free. And IMO it's pretty good for animation testing.

[des zac]

Can someone please tell me how you copy the animations? When I copy them it only seems to copy one frame, thanks

Des_Zac

[Mike]

You don't copy gifs, you have to save them by right clicking and going to "save image as" and then save it.


Not sure why you are using this thread to ask that...