Snake Curses- Walk Animations

[HezaKey]

I'm slowly but surely trying to animate the main character sprites for my silly game art project Snake Curses.  http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=15803.msg148151#msg148151
But since I am not an animator of any sort, I thought the animations could use their own special attention here.

My gut says something is off, but I don't where or how things got off pace.
Still a lot of stray pixels blinking on and off, but I want to be sure I have the movement spot on before doing hours of cleanup.

[||||]

Hello Milokey. Good to see Snake curses carrying on.

I made a decent hood movement edit.
Also made a half-ass edit on the shoulders. But have an explanation that may help more to go with it.

I think the shoulders look twitchy at the speed it is set at. Cause they each come forward for only 1 frame.. I think they'd look best with three frames; one in-between the frame now applied. Tried a quick edit for that.. it's just the shoulders coming forward for 2 frames on each side instead of one.



I didn't mess with the cloak but that looks pretty good. Maybe the chest should rotate just a bit though.

[Ryumaru]

Also the foot path is too much like this: () than this: ||
Don't be afraid to chance the shape of the foot  as it changes position from / to _ to \
Please excuse the awful symbol illustration- don't have the means to time efficiently edit animation currently. Hope this is still of some help, I like your project!

[HezaKey]

Thanks for the critique guys!
I started paying attention more and realized I was missing a lot of foot movement, so I tried to address that.
I also working on a left facing sprite.  I need to something with the movement cloak yet, but I haven't figured out yet how best to attack that problem.

[tim]

First I really like it.
The cloak seem very solid / static because it rotates exactly with the shoulders.
The shoulder rotation should send only send a wave on the cloth, while it move on its own too.

[Gil]

I think the main thing you should focus on is feet movement. It's still not very good. Fabric could use work, but that's such a tall order and I don't think it looks bad right now.

This is probably the best walk cycle I ever managed to do, so maybe it can help you out:



I have to say, I do love the looks of your project. You'll have to work hard to get there, but it looks marvelous in style.

[HezaKey]

Further progress.

Adding a little swish into the cape really brought a lot of life into it.  That was some fantastic advice.

I'm still trying to pick apart ||||'s edit, cause it looks really good, but I don't want to just copy it without understanding it.

[HezaKey]

down, left, up animations (right will be a repeat of the left animation, with it's own unique shading.)

After this will be tweaking and cleaning up the stray pixels.  Otherwise it's nearly complete.  Probably...  Hopefully...

[32]

This is looking really great and the fabric movement has added a lot of life. One thing to consider is that the fabric (or anything really) will drag as it gets further away from the source. I'm drawing a blank on the exact terminology (Edit: Follow through and overlapping action) but this image demonstrates what I mean.

Right now the fabric kind of acts like it's just doing the exact opposite motion moving forward as it is backward but in reality the two motions effect each other and getting a nice flowing pattern of movement would really take this the extra 10%. Particularly in the front and side views at the corners it would look nice if the fabric dragged or even folded a little as it swung forward, it is also apparent in the folds in the back view. Let me know if you don't understand and I'll throw together an edit. 

[CombustibleNate]

down, left, up animations (right will be a repeat of the left animation, with it's own unique shading.)

After this will be tweaking and cleaning up the stray pixels.  Otherwise it's nearly complete.  Probably...  Hopefully...

It appears that I need to preface with the fact that I am of no strong authority, but your middle animation caught my eye. While the feet placement of the other two are close together, the feet of the middle seem a little too far apart almost making her look bow legged. I think it might be due to the fact that the background left isn't long enough and also not moving further forward in relation to the way the body is angled. Try experimenting with that.

Your coloring and shading are superb however.