AuthorTopic: GR#203 - Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites  (Read 69441 times)

Offline astraldata

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #40 on: May 22, 2014, 04:35:59 pm
Any particular reason for the crouch? It seems a bit extraneous for putting on armor. I'd also bring the arms up into a more pronounced pose if I were you, perhaps by putting the body in the form of an 'X' sort of pose to emphasize the energy. Atm, the whole animation just looks like you put a lot of frames in there, but none have any real speed or sense of impact (major problem with most oldschool disney animations for example.)

Anime is an excellent example of how to counter the failings of Disney since they've honed the technique of very high-impact actions with very low frame counts. You seem to be falling into the Disney trap here unfortunately, with high frame counts to cover up your weak keyframe poses. Anime focuses on strong and dynamic keyframe poses, and only adds in the number of inbetweens necessary to convey that pose convincingly. In effect, the original keyframes are choppy and move sharply from one to the next, but proper spacing in your movements can cover up the seeming 'need' for more frames.

Just some food for thought.
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Offline Mathias

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #41 on: May 22, 2014, 05:32:18 pm
What a good way to put it, astraldata. I'm going to remember that.


And I agree with the crouching-jumping-ice-shards-stuff-animation thoughts.
While the action occurring is interesting - the way it plays out feels very undynamic - it's merely a monotonously spaced sequence of movements. There's no force, no vigor.
Stand up and follow through with that same action. Don't you want to make it really snappy and interesting? Vary speeds. Let a slight pause of anticipation happen before a prominent movement and execute the movement with no ease in, but but give it a slight ease out.

What you have is a nice rough draft. You've chosen a concept and you've got the choreography established. Now add some exaggeration, some eccentricity to it. Make it fun to watch.

Offline Rosier

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #42 on: May 22, 2014, 11:41:42 pm
Quote from: astraldata
Any particular reason for the crouch? It seems a bit extraneous for putting on armor.

As I mentioned, she's the opposite of Roman (The guy up there).  Extraneous is in her job description.  Plotwise, she's an future athlete who gives her fans a show.
The reason she's crouching is that she's jumping up really high into the air, which doesn't come across too well cause the animation is still.  The fuzz is supposed to insinuate that.

Quote from: astraldata
I'd also bring the arms up into a more pronounced pose if I were you, perhaps by putting the body in the form of an 'X' sort of pose to emphasize the energy. Atm, the whole animation just looks like you put a lot of frames in there, but none have any real speed or sense of impact (major problem with most oldschool disney animations for example.)

Anime is an excellent example of how to counter the failings of Disney since they've honed the technique of very high-impact actions with very low frame counts. You seem to be falling into the Disney trap here unfortunately, with high frame counts to cover up your weak keyframe poses. Anime focuses on strong and dynamic keyframe poses, and only adds in the number of inbetweens necessary to convey that pose convincingly. In effect, the original keyframes are choppy and move sharply from one to the next, but proper spacing in your movements can cover up the seeming 'need' for more frames.



Is this the kind of thing you're talking about?  All I could think when reading this was Tony Stark putting on the remote armor, the force of which flicks his arm a bit.

Otherwise, what I'm gathering is less 'smoothing' frames and more 'sharper/action' frames.

Quote from: Mathias
While the action occurring is interesting - the way it plays out feels very undynamic - it's merely a monotonously spaced sequence of movements. There's no force, no vigor.
Stand up and follow through with that same action. Don't you want to make it really snappy and interesting? Vary speeds. Let a slight pause of anticipation happen before a prominent movement and execute the movement with no ease in, but but give it a slight ease out.

What you have is a nice rough draft. You've chosen a concept and you've got the choreography established. Now add some exaggeration, some eccentricity to it. Make it fun to watch.

I tried playing with different speeds in the second one, but clearly not enough.

And I can't really play out the animation IRL.  It's a super soldier doing high jumps and then floating.  I can go back on it in my head, though.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #43 on: May 23, 2014, 12:48:18 am
EDIT:
Everytime I make a long ranting crit like this I'm a bit scared I'll scare the artist away from whatever subject they're attempting...so even though I really shouldnt (JOBZ!) to make up for it I ended up making an edit. That I have animation blue balls from concepting areas for too long (which I had never done before and I'm finding a bit hard) probably has some hand in it too:p

Click to see my gif edit of the transformation part

I did this after writing this bigass post. The post contains many of the ideas I used here, although I do go a bit effect crazy :p but really, until you get timing effects are more of a distraction, focus on that.

The effects went a bit in the gurren lagann/Imaishi style. watch that or something by studio trigger, they're the biggest exponents of anime intensity so try to aim for that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQrvmNz6STE hell, just try for any style of animation you admire (mitsuo iso is very cool too!)  just dont...keep on making movement where limbs move at an evenly spaced rate.
I'm a little bit...shocked that the only  "put on uniform while posing exageratedly " action you could think of was ironman...? anime has loads and loads of the stuff, they call it henshin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HtLiL-uDz8 personal favorite from my childhood. heh, the influence kinda shows

The reason we dont get that she's jumping is not because you dont have room in your canvas to actually move her upwards, the reason is because you made a very halfassed buildup pose for her jump and you also dont leave her jumping long enough to convey that she's in the air and she's moving.

Look at her crouch, she is crouching still with her torso almost completely vertical, you DO NOT see that in anime, their crouching stances are always as extreme as they can be, you cannot do that by keeping most of the pose from the last frame, you need to redraw a lot of it. I'm not really sure at this point, can you draw a head tilted downwards? you need to do that for that pose. Also, this IS something you could benefit from doing in real life, super soldier or not only someone doing a dance or a yoga pose ducks like that, your animation here much like your animation of that fire kick still has that sort of dancey impactless floaty quality to it because you're not being extreme enough with your poses.

Here is a post by pixel pile driver about timing, this is what's missing from your animations to really make them look like out of Hyper Light Drifter.
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=14964.msg137576#msg137576
Try easing up on all the effects and focus on injecting simple movements with a lot of energy, your animations wont really get better until you do.

http://afraux.tumblr.com/
Try looking at one of his gifs and pay attention to how many frames he spends at the beginning of the action and how many he spends at the middle, how many at the end. You'll find it's completely different from what you do, this is why you cannot do what he does by making your animations the way you always did and then tweaking each frame's timing afterwards

in fact, dont tweak the frame's timing at all. just draw the frames while being more mindful of timing. try setting all the frames to 10 (GIFS divide seconds in 1/100) so you KNOW you're doing the timing with the chanes in each frame, not with how long each frame lasts.

What program are you using to animate? I'm starting to think you're not using something that lets you animate as you draw. you need to use onion skin if you have it to see how much each frame is changing compared to the last one, or atleast flip back and forth so you have the best chance possible to improve your sense of timing
« Last Edit: May 23, 2014, 03:48:32 am by Conceit »

Offline Rosier

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #44 on: May 23, 2014, 04:44:30 am
I'm not gonna bother quoting that. 


It's gonna be hard to knock me away.  You guys know what you're freaking doing.  I may have some of my own way of doing things, but I've gotten better crit here in a few months than anywhere else.
From that animation, I'm gather that when something's moving, something's freaking moving.  Also, increase intensity.  The scale of the effects is a bit much for my tastes, but I get the point.
Also, I watch a bit of anime.  I just finished Gurren Lagann not too long ago, as well as Kill la Kill.  Saint Seiya is a no go, though. 

-Jumping and airs need better definitions.
-It's been a thing of mine to make motions smooth, which is why the crouch has a lot of similar frames.  It's clear this is the wrong direction.
-Tilting her head to more extremes will be easy now that I know to.
-PPD's tutorial/Afraux ought to be useful.

To animate, I use Game Maker's animator, then use Beneton to save it as a GIF and play with speed.  It doesn't include onion skin, but my process involves a heck of a lot of back tracking and side by sides.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #45 on: May 23, 2014, 09:49:12 pm
Good, I'm glad you're not discouraged. No one's suprised you're not quoting me, dont want you to smother under the wall of text :p

I understand the desire for smooth movement, but what you have right now is movements that always have the same amount of smoothness, it has to go up and down according to how much inertia there is. The constant speeding up and down in an animation according to the actions is what makes this sort of fight action interesting. dont show the frames between when an attack starts and it hits, pause for dramatic effect when your character is going to put on it's armor, etc.

Did you like gurren lagann? notice what I was trying to copy with their constant use of exagerated motion blurs? man, you prolly have all the examples of henshin you'll ever need in kill la kill, they get a new armor like every episode. 

lol you dont have to watch Saint Seiya just because I did when I was a kid! I was just suggesting that you choose good actions within an anime you like and watch frame by frame, see how much changes in each frame and try to put what you learn from that in what you do. That is a lot easier to do with gifs, that is why I suggest Sean Leslie Ward's stuff over and over. there's a game called CRAWL which has a blog with cool gifs too. if you're going for pure smoothness Metal Slug or Street Fighter 3 is probably your kinda thing too :p

Even the edit I made, check how all the frames have the same delay but it has good rhythm. Try that exercise, try making an animation with better rhythm without tweaking the frame delay.
« Last Edit: May 23, 2014, 10:11:30 pm by Conceit »

Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #46 on: May 23, 2014, 10:36:50 pm
Quote
Try that exercise, try making an animation with better rhythm without tweaking the frame delay.
Just to add to that:
If you need a frame to last longer just duplicate it several times.
This makes it easy to add new unique drawings without having to change the overall timing of the animation.

Also I recommend giving Graphics Gale a try.
« Last Edit: May 23, 2014, 10:44:56 pm by PixelPiledriver »
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Offline Rosier

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #47 on: May 24, 2014, 06:45:08 am



Before I start playing around with better animations, I was working on this over the last week or so on and off.  It's not really HLD style in terms of the actual in game backgrounds, but more of me just trying to make an environment establishing scene with a HLD style.

It's obviously really simple in terms of design and color, but the main idea around it is 'Cheery Futuristic City.'

Offline astraldata

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #48 on: May 24, 2014, 04:34:57 pm
I second both Conceit and PPD's suggestions.

I use Graphics Gale and it is great for the sort of thing Conceit is mentioning about frame to frame timing staying the same. Although you *can* change the timing per frame, you can also set all frames to the same timing to get a better sense of spacing and movement. The roundabout way you're doing it now apparently is causing you a lot of issues when coming down to timing and spacing without being able to see it all in realtime speeds (GM speeds are garbage for true previews unfortunately, and needing to tweak spacing by a pixel or two during flipping through an animation after you've already exported it sounds like a nightmare of a process.)

Animation aside for the moment, as far as your BG goes, I don't really see a lot of life to it, which would give the impression of 'cheery' to me. The other NPC people are standing there like robots, and if your main char is all stoic or smth, that's understandable, but not everybody in a 'cheery' city should be stoic. D:

Try making the woman talking on her cellphone with the bag at her feet and the mime in a pose as if he's in an invisible box or something. Just stuff to give them character. I'd also suggest some additional rooms / sections of the buildings to give them some sense of depth or shape. Atm, they look like cardboard cutouts.
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Offline Rosier

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Re: Hyper Light Drifter Inspired Sprites

Reply #49 on: May 25, 2014, 06:01:56 am


Admittedly a bit minor, but changed the characters around.  Red's now mid walk and on a holo call, Blue's engaged in friendly bartering, Not/Mime is being attack hugged, and Ginger's recording something. The Arch building also has a bit more movement/interesting things going on.