Mini animation, having troubles with it

[Parkerbaby]

It is important to reference life when possible, I think. This girl's body moves when she walks. Her body is higher up when her legs are vertical straight under her than when her legs are bent at an angle. A bent leg must give up some ground to a straight leg.

Also, the torso moves when walking. With the current animation, the arm stretches one way from a fixed position and then comes back and stretches the other way. Allow the shoulders to move a pixel or a two with the arms to show slight rotation.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Oh yeah I guess your right, when I tried walking for a reference for about two feet I went the other way my bad.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Ok, played a bit more with this. Pretty much replicated your legs, removed/added few pixels, and of course, switch the cycle of hand rotation. Implemented full torso wobble, but still not sure if it's necessary for such small sprite.

I'm leaning a lot from you Mr. Fahrenheit. Especially about the effects of small subtle details, pixel size! Many thanks! And to others for additional inputs.

This is really stimulating. Might attempt to do more complicated moves, like crouching, jumping and running, although that will move me away a bit from my original simple adventure game project. Hrm...maybe I should try animating him walking toward and from screen first.

EDIT: BTW, how do you save GIF with transparent background? If I do that, one frame "smudges" over the other.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Well, if your in gimp you have to put in (replace) on each frame. This will make each frame replace the last. Also, this is looking so much better and this is a learning experience for me too!

[Grimsane]

looks incredibly stiff, suggestions and an edit, some of the leg frames were 1 pixel off so realigned them for smoother leg motion, tilted the entire body forward to look more natural, human's don't have perfectly straight postures, and also when you walk you are transfering your weight forward onto the forward foot, so it looks more natural


exact same edit but with and without alpha, probably better with BG colour on the current forum theme  , but yes with gifs in your software each layer should have (100ms)<the delay between frames and (combine) or (replace) < this is the frame disposal/cumulation method, 100ms is a 10th of a second, 1000ms is of course 1 second the normal format of gif can only handle hundredths of a second/10ms increments so if you write 16ms it will be scaled up to 20ms (or down I'm not entirely certain, but it definetly will not register the last digit)

stilll looks rather rigid I think mainly due to the head, maybe it will help to have it drop for to frames, invert the up and down pattern.

*oops sleeve and arm length changes because I started messing with the arms but stopped, take the isolated frames as a suggestion

[Parkerbaby]

This is a quick edit just to give general ideas. Directly contact there is a point when legs are splayed out at a rather wide angle with a toe pointing down and a toe pointing up. Also, I felt the shoulders could move more dramatically from one side of the body to the other.

In the reference I posted you can see at the extreme points in the cycle, the base of the girl's arm covering her upper back from being visible while at the other extreme it is covering part of her chest.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Ok, here it is. Another edit:

Extremely useful advises. Thanks guys. Incorporated Grimsane's weight transfer and Parkerbaby's tips on shoulder movement and the foot shape in the moment it's about the raise from the ground. I think this subtle change really has an effect. I also made few additional (two)-pixel size corrections.

Phew!

This sprite progressed way over my head and the scope of my game project. I would take me ages to come to this point without you. Nevertheless, I will try to continue with this path on other characters and others modes of movement. We'll see.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Hopefully you will post them here because I would love to see them!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Uh, finding little time to pixel lately. Juggling to many things. :/

Anyway, trying to get face walking animation right, ATM.

Not happy with the posture. Especially the position of arms. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any tips on improving this work? Thanks!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I've put more work on it. Enlarged, because the game will emulate 80x60 resolution (full screen or in 640x480) so maybe it's incorrect if you observe it in the original resolution.

As always, tips, comments, critics, are appreciated.

Now not happy with the face, but not sure what I can do there to make it more appealing.