Pixel animation! YAY!

[valdimer]

So I posted this in pixel art and I apologize for posting this in the wrong section.  However I need a critique and I wonder why this animation is not fluid?

[pistachio]

It's not fluid because there's no path of movement, no continuity. What you get then is a lot of jitters or inconsistent-looking framerates (from held frames).

The head of the sprite has a motion path, up/down (but has held frames) but the fire looks blocked in without structure or hierarchy. You basically winged it. It looks OK in individual frames, but you put it together and it spazzes out. Making it fluid is what animation's all about.

Check out this post about animating fire, study these examples.
Block out motion and all that with a large brush, do a hell of a lot of frame flipping to check if the base motion is correct before moving on to details.

[valdimer]

Sweet dude! Thanks for the input I'll take a look and adjust accordingly!

[CelioHogane]

One thing you could do for testing is move the first frames of the animation to the end, you could compare better the loop of your animations.

[valdimer]

   So I did a little touching up on the flames.  It's not quite there yet I know, but I think it does look better.  Or maybe I'm on crack, what do you think? Anyways I decided I'm not doing the flames on the bottom because it seems like it's just too much, although now i'm not sure what to do with it there.  I'll keep working on it, thanks for the feedback so far!

[valdimer]

So I did some more refinement and adjustment.  I hope it doesn't look as chaotic as it did.  This is my first time trying to tackle pixel art and pixel animation and boy, it isn't as easy as it looks   Let me know what you think.  Is it better?