run and slash animations

[[Friends] Ro$$]

Hi, I'm working on a few animations for a platformer game. I'm trying to get good run and slashing animations down, this is what I've got so far, any critique would be great!

[cels]

I'm not good with running animations. What you have looks fairly good to me.

The slashing animation is a bit odd. I know it's not finished, since it doesnt loop correctly, but it looks like it's intended to be a very heavy blow, since he's actually turning into it and stepping forward at the same time. If you have the time to let him wind up the slash a bit more, like putting more weight on his rear leg before lunging forward, that would make sense. And I also think you need to worry about how he's supposed to stop his momentum, because right now he's not really stopping the motion with the foot he's putting forward, so it looks like he's just going to keep spinning unless he gains balance.

My amateur opinion as an animator with exactly 0 animations under my belt.

[[Friends] Ro$$]

Yeah, you're definitly right about that, and I'll try to do a bit of improvement! I wasn't aiming for it to be that heavy of a blow. Unfortunately I can't have any wind up frames as the slash has to happen almost instantly when the player presses to slash

[astraldata]

If this is supposed to be a quick slash, I would highly suggest that you start with is posture more upright, with a simple lean back, then forward.

The edit below is salvaging this as best as possible into a quick powerful slash. As you might have noticed, the "blade" is too short to appear to do anything to the opponent. The arm movement was strange (like he was trying to touch his nose with the bat/blade) while moving the bat across his shoulders. I fixed that by adding more fore shortening (which you need to get the hang of before you start trying animation. )



I completed the leg movement a frame prior to its completion in the original animation so that I can give it more power and show the dissipation of energy from the attack by moving the foot slightly forward in the final frame.

A final thing to note is that the tip of the bat/blade/whatever follows an arc from the initial motion across a 3d plane. Without that arc, your motion will always look goofy and unnatural no matter what you do. The body moves in arcs, and thus so does the limbs and anything attached to them. Keep this in mind when doing any sort of attack animation -- they *all* move in an arc of some form -- even if it's just a straight jab.



Also, this is still only 4 frames.

[[Friends] Ro$$]

Oh yeah, that definitely looks more realistic! The number of frames doesn't really matter to me and I will probably add in more later. I meant for the sword at that frame to be pointing out of the screen along the -z I guess, but that's hard to get across in two colors, yours definitely looks better, especially the head turn the earlier frame. I will get another wip done

[astraldata]

The key to keeping this working properly (i.e. swiftly), is to keep the number of frames reasonably low. It's always excellent practice to learn how to establish effective keyframes by using a low number of frames. In an animation consisting of 3 frames or more, you generally have 2 keyframes and at least 1 transition-frame (a 'T' frame lol) and, essentially, every other frame is treated as an inbetween (assuming you're animating a single action such as a sword slice -- walking is actually 2 actions -- left foot step and a right foot step -- assuming you're doing a loop.)

That being said, the minimum "realistically-fluid" walk-loop is at least 6 frames -- 3 for each footstep, but it's not a hard rule or anything. Anything larger than, say, 3 frames, you do need a transition-pose and possibly some inbetweens too.

In your particular slash/bat attack, the second frame was the only 'inbetween' in the animation, while the first frame and last frame were the keyframes (or 'extremes' in animator terminology) of the action, which count as the preparation and recovery frames of the action, and the one where you can see the actual bat extending in front of the character is the transition frame (the high-point of the action's execution) essentially, which is the frame that really counts toward characterization and clarity of the overall action -- a very important frame, so it needs to be dealt with accordingly.

Ideally though, as hinted at before regarding the walk loop, you generally should treat separate overall motions as separate actions, which essentially gives you the ability to keyframe and transition them effectively on their respective extremes.

As a final note, slower and more subtle actions tend to require more frames, but to keep them quick, you need to use the bare minimum at first, adding in frames only where you want to enhance the 'snap' of an action with delays or overlapping action (when recovering from a sharp/fast attack.)

These are pretty good animations for a start though. Just keep in mind that the waist, then shoulders, then elbows, and only *then* the wrists control where the tip of that bat/weapon will go, so take special care to position those properly so that they follow along the arc you intend to represent along the z-axis. My edit doesnt exemplify this arc due to the angle of the swing, but it's a good example of a good strong horizontal slice, and if you look closely, you can still see hints at the arc in the action.

[Alex Sinigaglia]

I wanted to give this animation a new frame and the blur effect for the sword:


I didn't make anatomy edits, only the blur and the new frame (edited from the last frame of the original gif).

[astraldata]

@Alex:
Looks smoother than the original, but the problem is still the arc. You'd need the frame where the bat is extended forward to blur back toward the 2nd frame, showing it crossing his face over his shoulders in order for that edit to work completely. Aside from that, nice pixel shifts to end the action.

[Fizzick]

with such a large blade there should be a slight slide forward after the swing is finished.