knight sprite, first attempt at walking animation -updated

[skoby]

First of all, I will admit that I have been heavily influenced by a walking tutorial I found through the resources topic on here, http://www.manningkrull.com/pixel_art/tutorials/walking.asp I never copy and pasted anything but it did help me a lot with the legs and I wouldnt know where to begin if it wasnt for that tutorial.



I'm sure there are a fair few things to change but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, since I've barely tried any animation before.

[Lukkas]

This is a very nice first attempt. 

My recommendations for improving it would be to first speed your frames up slightly. .1 seconds should be an adequate speed. It is currently set at .16, and to me this makes him appear to be moving in slow motion.

That could be a matter of preference though.

My second recommendation would be to make his shoulders move more as he walks. Currently his upper body is very static, and this works against the illusion of his walking. His arms only pivot from within his shoulder plates, which looks unnatural.

Aside from those issues, very well done.

[skoby]

Thanks for the comments, I did deliberately make it a bit slower I had it faster at first and it was hard for me to see any problems with individual frames and I forgot to speed it back up again, I'll give the shoulder movements a go later, I'm guessing I should be keeping it fairly subtle "rotating" the shoulder pad slightly with the arm motion and maybe 1 pixels horizontal motion? I thought I might be able to get away without shoulder motion since armour would be quite restrictive, but I should know by now that when it comes to pixel art the lazy way is rarely the best way.

Edit: Got a chance to do some changes and I've tried to animate a cape but not too sure on it yet so I've put it as a seperate image on here. I tried to animate the highlighting of the chest to represent the shadow of the arm and to hopefully create the illusion of some motion of the upper body.

[Lukkas]

Excellently done, this is far more polished than your original. Congratulations.

You've even got a little hair movement in there. Good touch. I think the animation is about as fluid as you'll get for that number of frames at that size.

There are other areas that could be critiqued. I think the cape is a nice addition and I'm liking it, but it appears a little bit like it's too far on one arm. It's like the cape is too far away from the arm closest to the observer. This might be fixed through shading, or by modifying the shape. I'm not sure. I can't quite put my finger on what it is that needs to be changed. I still think it looks good as is, though.

Aside from that, if you're looking to make further improvements, you could reconsider the palette, and play with the shading. What you have is definitely functional and I think it looks nice, but you can always improve and try to hone it further. The real question is whether or not you're satisfied with it.

If I were you, I would probably be satisfied with it at this state. I think it's great.