Knight attack animation

[Friend]

Just a tip, but motion blur never makes an animation have more impact, motion blur is just a fancy effect that can be fun to play around with.

i just wanted to comment that i personally completely disagree with this.    in fact i think motion blur is a great tool to sell impact because it can be used to greatly emphasize the contrast between the motion itself and the sudden halt of impact.  for instance, the sprites below.  in the kick you see the contrast between the heavy motion blur leading into the halt of impact.

 in the scratch in the other sprite, the motion blur actually signals the start of impact of the scratch against the skin of whoever is being scrathed




blur could also be used to signal that something has been impacted with force.  for instance, say you have a friend standing in front of you with their back turned.  you run full speed at them and drop kick them in the back of the neck.  if your drop kick game is strong, then your friend might fly head first to the ground in a blur of motion because of the sudden action of force upon a still figure

[Atnas]

I would say that motion blur is probably an essential tool of the pixel animator, because usually framerates are so low that it's hard to make large movements smooth without increasing the number of tweens, which would slow the animation down. I wouldn't call it a fancy effect at all.

However, I have found it's useful to determine a project-wide threshold for when you use motion blur, so that you aren't just blurring the smallest of movements. Pick a distance/time (speed = pixels moved/framecount) that motion blur will kick in, and stick to it. I actually think that's a problem with the kicking lavender man that friend posted, the arms moving back actually seem faster than the leg because they are skipping a distance without blurring (showing a tween which does not exist) whereas the actual kick itself is blurred and thus less fast.