sword strike exercise for standard RPG perspective

[morpai]

Hello everyone! this is my first post in pixelation. I recently got interested in sprite animation as a hobby, and i'm a 3d animator in my daily job.

I'm doing some exercises to learn the different perspectives normally used in games, and now I went for a standard RPG perspective. To me, it was way more harder and time consuming than the sidescroller one!

Anyway this is my exercise: 



I wanted to do a plain horizontal swipe in front of the character, but ended up to look more like a down-to-up swipe. I think it's cause of the sword shape (which stays flat to the camera for most of the frames),  but i'm sure you guys can better identify what went wrong.  Also some might say that it anticipates like a pierce attack, and ends up to be a swing.

I'd love to know how much time a professional would take to do an animation like this (cause i personally took forever!)

thanks in advance :)


...should i post in the pixel art section? looks like it gets checked more often than this, and there are animations threads in there too.

[rikfuzz]

You're not getting any replies because actually it's very difficult to work out what to do about that specific problem, and tbh, it looks very good as is.

I think after watching it for about 9,000 loops, it might look like it's traveling vertically partly because the motion isn't an arc - it starts as a forward jab, so it's sort of 'off-centre' to her left, and that is also the axis where height is implied in this perspective.

[Kazuya Mochu]

One thing that bugs me is that the sword is almost always pointing to the front. I feel like the character should get some momentum by swinging it like a baseball bat.
so maybe frame 2 and 3 could be the sword swinging back so that it can go forward.

Ref: Just imagine that flipped horizontally

[32]

I intended to post on this but I totally forgot . Anyway I think your issue is that she's facing sort of down diagonally to the right but swipes in the upper right quadrant. The swipe really needs to cover more space on the bottom to look truly horizontal, I think if you just pull the bottom of the canvas out and make the blur arc downward more you'll find it solves some problems. While I'm not really a professional so I can't speak to that exactly I can say that I would expect something like this to take me about 3 or so hours. Pixel animation is not for the weak of heart

Also please post your images at 1x zoom here, we have a click zoom function and it makes everything easier to edit. I think your animation is really nice and the perspective is solid 

Edit: haha, pretty much what rikfuzz said. I should also clarify per PPD's estimate below that I'm talking animation only, for completed cleaned up his estimate is more reasonable.

[PixelPiledriver]

Welcome to Pixelation! 

...should i post in the pixel art section? looks like it gets checked more often than this, and there are animations threads in there too.

It just takes time to get replies.
Things are slow here compared to the rest of the internet.

Agree with rikfuzz.
And same thoughts as 32.
I actually thought this was a diagonal attack for an isometric view before reading your text.
The placement of the eyes is a little misleading.

I would try reversing the sword in her hand away from slash to create the sweeping angle.
Having the sword overlap her body in the front could also help.
And the shape of the slash could be better tuned to reinforce the perspective.
Here's a super quick edit.

I'd love to know how much time a professional would take to do an animation like this (cause i personally took forever!)

I would sink 5 or so hours into something like this easily.
Maybe a few more if I did a handful of variations.

[Cyangmou]

If it's a plain horizontal swing, keep in mind that from an rpg viewpoint every horizontal circle appears as ellipse with a 4/3 width/height ratio.

this optimal shape however can get squished and transformed, because hip, ribcage, shoulders and elbow are changing their angles in (swordfight) movements.
Usually swordfighters tend to lie weight in the slashes, at least if we are talking about weapon types like classic swords, sabers and katanas.
If you want to force the projection impression, stay with the idealised shape.

Since I assume we are talking about game-art:
The other thing you have to keep in mind are the gameplay aspects.
Does it hit only the enemy in front of you?
Does it hit enemies at a cone in front of you?
Is the anticipation before the animation short enough that it feels responsive enough in the game?

How long it will take depends strongly on how much tweaking it needs in order to get a responsive gameplay.
Looks good is not the same as plays good. Never confuse those two things.
Looks alright, but plays well is better than looks great but plays shit if your goal is to make a game.

Just doing the animation and considering all the edits you will definitely need to ship a product, I'd roughly calculate with at least a day of work per animation like this in the planning stages of a project.

[morpai]

thanks for all the answers, you confirmed that there was something weird going on with the strike itself. I did a quick moc-up and then I didn't really iterate from there, I just went for the "final" result.

@32 I wasn't aware of the click-zoom function, i'll post it at 1x next time!

@PPD thanks for the edit, the purpose of the action itself it's definitely more readable, also looks better with a more steady head. I think i wanted to animate "too many things" and got carried away by that. 

@ Cyangmou While I asked myself some of those questions (especially the "is it responsive enough") I ended up going for "a" swing instead on focusing on the initial idea. If i have to do animations for combat game, I think that i would use the rough moc-up directly in game until it "feels good" and only after that i would draw the final version. Do you often/always work in this way?

I have a question (well one of the many..) Let's say I want to do a 3 hit combo with this character. Would you proceed to animate the whole sequence as a single animation? What happens if the player doesn't keep attacking, I will need to do some extra frames to go from that breaking point back to the idle? Or it's ok to just snap to it from any point?

cheers, have a good day : )

[Kazuya Mochu]

I made a little edit, even though I'm not 100% happy. but it at least has more of the pulling the sword back for momentum.

[Cyangmou]

@ Cyangmou While I asked myself some of those questions (especially the "is it responsive enough") I ended up going for "a" swing instead on focusing on the initial idea. If i have to do animations for combat game, I think that i would use the rough moc-up directly in game until it "feels good" and only after that i would draw the final version. Do you often/always work in this way?

I have a question (well one of the many..) Let's say I want to do a 3 hit combo with this character. Would you proceed to animate the whole sequence as a single animation? What happens if the player doesn't keep attacking, I will need to do some extra frames to go from that breaking point back to the idle? Or it's ok to just snap to it from any point?

depends, without knowing what the gameplay is there is no point to do draw an animation anyways. Usually it's the game designers job to come up with the design of the battle system and the artist just illustrates whats needed.
All the things which could happen (like stopping an attack at a certain point etc.) are restrictions which you need to know in order to draw a fitting animation and to prevent clipping.

Except you go for the chaos-system that you first draw the animations and build the gameplay around that, but the visuals are merely there to support the gameplay, so why not fleshing out the gameplay first?
I personally dislike the chaos-system.

The wonderful thing about working digitally is that we always can go back and revise things completely. It' sjust all about the process you want to have for your game and what you value about games - you can build your complete art process around your priorities.

[Probo]

yeah things like animation priority and windows of time for the user to cancel an animation are all gameplay concerns firstly. a game which commits you to completing a full attack animation every time you press the button, or has a long anticipation animation before you actually attack for example, would feel slower and more thoughtful than a game where every move comes out lightning fast and can be cancelled almost at will. i suppose an example of the former would be dark souls and the latter something like MGS rising.

youd then have to design enemies that are fun to fight within that system. Make belmont's whip take 12 more frames to come out in castlevania on the NES and suddenly the game is unbalanced or at least less fun, not necessarily because animation priority is a bad thing but because the enemies and their behaviours were ultimately designed with the response time and range of that whip hugely in mind

best way to find out whats fun to you and to think about which direction has the most potential, is to make it! prototype out some combat systems, maybe think about what games in this genre you like.