[C+C] [Nudity] Game Main Character: Female Spy

[MysteryMeat]

At native rez it looks excellent. Don't flip your brain over it, sometimes things don't look as good zoomed in as zoomed out. Kind of the nature of pixels as a whole really!

Next, let's see some of the animations! A good idle seems like a place to start. Gentle sway of the clothing, maybe a bit of a bob?

[basstabs]

First and foremost, what would be a program some people recommend to do pixel art and animation? I've been using Gimp, which I'm fairly comfortable with and works really well for static images. In trying to do animation, though, I've found that Gimp's "animation" tools are really lackluster and I couldn't figure out a way to export my animation as a gif without changing a bunch of things around and even then it was a really jumpy, broken mess. (So right now I just have links I found to a renderer, not actual files for the animations ) It also is surprisingly hard to find a program which cuts an image with frames in a grid and exports them to an animated gif, or at least I couldn't find one. That seems like a basic thing you'd want to be able to do, but I digress. Most of the tools I found wanted you to upload separate images for each frame, which doesn't work with how my game engine handles sprites. Basically software recommendations would be highly appreciated ^_^

So after multiple attempts, I've given up on making something good and just vomited what I have currently on here to hopefully get some feedback on how to make it good I initially tried to make her bob in place in something like a fighting stance, but with her hand on her hip it looked awkward. So now I'm trying to make her shift her weight slightly onto her right leg and then back to the front, which causes the dress to sway a little. Needless to say my results haven't been very good.

Right now the upper body's movement is really jerky, as is her hip movement, and the hip movement seems really out of sync with the movement of the dress. The movement of the dress seems sorta okay to me though?

(Links to the animations actually playing, hopefully:)
Dress
Nude

[MysteryMeat]

Aseprite, no contest. Best animation interface I have ever used.

[basstabs]

So I downloaded Asesprite and messed around a bit, I must say I like it a lot

I didn't have any time to work on fixing the animations yet, but I did export them as gifs so they can be embedded here rather than linked to.




I'd definitely like some tips on how to make it feel less jerky overall, or whether it would be better to forego a breathing animation and rather to just do like an idle animation that plays every so often.

[Curly]

Add more movement! In order to move the hips you have to move other body parts. I rotated her leg and torso for the hip movement and added some more little movements to make her look more dynamic. It still feels a bit weird, animation isn't my thing

Edit:

Original:

[basstabs]

Phew. So I tried quite a few different things, but I wasn't able to make them look smooth enough for my liking. Finally I settled on adding the foot pivot and shifting her torso a little further total to make it less jerky. Would speeding it up/slowing it down make it work a little better? I'm thinking about adding a little bit of a bob to her hair, but I'm not sure if I can do that while keeping it subtle.

[MysteryMeat]

Try some subpixeling stuff! Basically the concept is changing pixel colors to imply subtler movements, metal slug used the concept a lot

[basstabs]

So after trying a bunch to animate her hair but failing to come up with anything that looked convincing, I decided to move on to a basic run cycle. Two weeks and about 10 failed attempts later, I decided to say screw the run cycle for now and work on something else. Right now this is what I have for the crouching pose:



I'm... not unhappy with most of it, but I have not at all been able to figure out what to do with her right arm. My initial idea was to turn her shoulders and have her hold the gun with two hands, but I'd like to have her shoot one-handed because I think it'll make animating her running+shooting and jumping+shooting animations easier. Also I struggled to make it visually clear that it was both arms rather than a single, gigantic, mutated limb. Any suggestions on what to do with her second arm would be much appreciated. Also, is the gun detailed enough? I wasn't quite sure what to do with it, and I struggled to add volume to it now that it's sideways and not at an angle.

Also, my plan is to have the crouching "animation" be very static and minimal, like maybe blinking every couple of seconds. Ideally this is because when she's crouching she's trying to remain hidden/stealthy in theory. She's already pretty stiff, though, am I missing out on an opportunity to make her "alive" by not doing much with her crouching pose? In general I found from her standing position that a breathing animation is beyond my skillset without looking like her breasts are alive

Lastly, some input on how to start a run cycle would be lovely. I have a copy of "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams and I tried using some of his runs as a starting point, but I just couldn't get it to translate to the screen like I wanted. In general I had issues keeping her limbs "in proportion" with those of her standing pose, it felt like they were stretching and shortening unnaturally when I watched it in motion.

[PypeBros]

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I note the gun is closer to the head on left picture, which looks like a more natural posture. Holding it 20cm away is likely to put more stress on the arm's muscles.

There's also something with the shape of the elbow that should be fixed. If you can find some reference picture, it might help.

[MysteryMeat]

I'd argue against the more natural posture there since it muddies the silhouette. The legs might be a good change to look at though, they're a bit thicker and the feet taper out of them a bit more naturally than they do in the current sprite.