Character slap attack animation

[orotoros]

Working on the basic attack animation for a game character. It started out as a punch, but half way through it started looking like a slap so I rolled with it. Would love some feedback. I feel like the weight of the slap isn't quite there yet.

[astraldata]

All in all, your arcs are great and your animation has a lot of potential -- it just needs that little bit of a push so it stands on its own. There's a lot you can do to increase the feeling of weight in this animation:

My edit -->
Original -->


1) Add more anticipation to the action's preparation frame by adding a bit more exaggeration to the pulling back of the arm pose (always push an animation's key poses a bit farther than it would likely go in real life in order to give it more 'pop' because 'change' is the lifeblood of animation!)

2) Weight is best indicated by a follow-through of motion which means the contact frame of the slap should begin the slowing down of the body/torso, but while the torso is still in motion, you will have to indicate that motion -- even if it is a sudden stop -- and in my edit, I do this by shifting the torso upward a pixel or so instead of forward to indicate there's still energy left in his torso motion before it finally stops, leading to the follow-through you need to indicate the weight of the body being put into the slap.

3) To indicate the forcefulness of the slap, his feet/toes must be planted firmly in place if the action is with his body -- all the motion of this guy's feet/toes forces him to lose energy the entire time and also distracts the observer from the main motion, breaking down the illusion of impactfulness since all the energy appears to dissipate through the feet and torso before the attack ends (I say torso because in your version, the torso moves backwards instead of carrying forward the follow-through -- I addressed this in point 2 though).

4) In the end, there are little flourishes you can add to indicate weight even further like the forward-bounce of the hair in my version, and you could do this with clothes, the mustache, the beard, whatever you want -- as mentioned before, the follow-through is what indicates weight, and it's usually best to exaggerate things like this to give your animation more life -- poses aren't the only thing you can/should exaggerate.

[orotoros]

This is awesome! thanks for taking the time to do an edit and break it down like that. I was trying to figure out how to get the hair motion right for so long and I think you nailed it. I'll take a closer look at the individual frames later today.

Here's this guy's walk/run animation. Any thoughts on this one? Again I think the hair motion could use some work.




It's slowed down a bit when it's used in-game.

[astraldata]

No problem. Glad I could help!

As for your new animation, once again, great potential, but just needed a little more 'push' to get it just right.

My edit -->
Original -->

The head bob side-to-side is a great touch to help him look like he's jogging and shifting that weight back and forth. The biggest issue you really seem to have is just not pushing the 'change' enough in some places. Most of these places are minor, but the supposedly 'minor' places just so happen to be the most important details in helping a motion read in the subconscious as these places show subtle stuff like weight, inertia, and just the general 'energy' of a character. By pushing these places and making them appear to 'change' more, you make characters more interesting to the observer and thus they seem to be full of life. For such a stylistic Chuck Norris looking guy like this, that's exactly what you'd want imo.

My changes are really minor and there are other improvements that could be made (such as the belt line being too jerky and the gig line too static), but my improvements are as follows:

1) The hair, obviously, since it gives a bit more interest to the head shape/silhouette -- the silhouette is important in animated pixel art, and you want to be sure that changes as much as possible wherever you can manage it to do so, whether realistically or stylistically.

2) The hands, since they just needed more change than they had -- I just made them come forward across the body more prominently during the forward extremes, essentially just pushing the pose just that little bit more, and not much more than that.