AuthorTopic: Flourish Animation  (Read 29591 times)

Offline MysteryMeat

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #40 on: August 22, 2018, 01:04:33 am
I'm noticing you draw people with the same proportions a lot. You should try some of these with more out-there designs, like beefy folks or big fat ones. Try to train yourself out of always drawing lanky anime people!
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Offline Rosier

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #41 on: August 25, 2018, 06:58:06 am
I'm noticing you draw people with the same proportions a lot. You should try some of these with more out-there designs, like beefy folks or big fat ones. Try to train yourself out of always drawing lanky anime people!

but i like muh animesss



Yeah, it has been a while since I animated something other than a regular normal-sized human.  Going to this reminded me that I'm out of practice for sure; for one, the design is lifted heavily from the golems from Indivisible, and the animation is just a punched up version of the attack's concept art from the game.  I've been wanting to make a golem animation for a while, but nothing was clicking, so I ended up copying a lot. http://indivisible.wikia.com/wiki/Golem

Offline Rosier

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #42 on: August 30, 2018, 04:57:44 am



Went ahead and rethought the whole thing out.  I went back and grabbed a really old sprite I did of a fat monster character (It's actually recycled from the metallic shading topic in the banner!) and worked it into this.  In addition to being actually original, I did a lot more of what I wanted to illustrate; it actually looks and moves like something made of clay as opposed to just a stubby human, and utilizes the rubbery look I want it too.  The idea is that it hits the ground, sucks up some rocks, and then tosses them ahead of it, which is a lot better than recycling stuff from a game.

Offline astraldata

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #43 on: August 31, 2018, 03:53:44 pm


Rainbow Lady:
Added more of an object to her hand before she throws.  It's supposed to just be magic, so it's just an orb.  I also played with the trail so it has more of a path, and made the wavelengthy bars more like a sound wave, as it's supposed to be music themed.

Arm Lady:
Messed with the right arm's position, so hopefully it looks a bit more like she's turning.

Rainbow Lady: Definitely looks a LOT better and has a more genuine sense of energy (and consistency) about it now. Great job!
Arm Lady: MUCH more "punch" to the animation now. The movement on this looks top notch. :)

The whipping "blob" monster: Might want to give more of an "absorbing" sense about it because it definitely doesn't seem that readable. You could make the "blob" on the hand go up through the arm (as if it were a heavy blob of stuff) and into the shoulder and then emphasize the recoil by making it "bounce back" into the body's center-mass to make its "absorption" read a lot better.

The punching "blob" monster: I'm not sure what you were going for with the black bar on the elbow, but it completely disappears in the punch. For it to be such a prominent pose in the animation, it definitely doesn't seem to have any real effect on the animation and doesn't seem to contribute any overall weight or energy to it either. Sorry I can't give a better critique than this, but it's pretty hard to tell what you were going for with this outside of a basic punch (which wouldn't look so bad if there was less build-up to the actual punch action) -- Ultimately the black bar on the elbow makes me anticipate, but then when it suddenly disappears, my mind is disappointed because I expected it to go do something more than just disappear. Rather than subvert my expectations, it would be better to simply not make it so prominent before the action (or actually do something with it that contributes momentum or energy to the whole animation -- assuming you had something particular in mind). Hopefully that makes sense.
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Offline Rosier

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #44 on: August 31, 2018, 08:11:41 pm


I also added some more frames to the arm movement, as I felt it was kinda jerky. 


As for the arm thing, that was supposed to act as a pile bunker.  So, the golem positions its arm, "loads a shot," and punches, with the bar acting as a piston to (supposedly) give the punch more impact.  In retrospect, I could have vastly dramatized the burst of it firing off, but really, I'm not happy with the animation as a whole.  It's serviceable, but it's pretty much a trace job, and it seems I failed at the only thing that made it original.  I'm much happier with the new one, as it's not traced, and has a bit more thought going on in how a thing made of clay moves.

Offline Rosier

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #45 on: September 05, 2018, 06:32:31 am


Thought I'd try making a mockup of a conversation.  It's kinda based on the later Fire Emblems, where the large portrait slides in and then they start talking.  Also gave me an opportunity to make larger, "Talk," sprites.  I'm more happy with blondie than with blue; it's mostly the head area on both of them.

Offline MysteryMeat

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #46 on: September 05, 2018, 08:26:46 am
they don't read very well as talk Sprites, those tend to have a lot more emphasis on both pose and mouth movements. they're usually done from the torso up like in Phoenix right for that reason
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Offline Rosier

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #47 on: September 05, 2018, 07:39:17 pm
they don't read very well as talk Sprites, those tend to have a lot more emphasis on both pose and mouth movements. they're usually done from the torso up like in Phoenix right for that reason


You know, it never occurred to me that talk sprites should probably have mouths... 
Eh, I still wanted to make bigger sprites as practice.  I got the idea because I made blue guy's shrug animation and didn't feel it was worth posting by itself because it was so simple.

Offline astraldata

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #48 on: September 20, 2018, 08:31:08 pm
they don't read very well as talk Sprites, those tend to have a lot more emphasis on both pose and mouth movements. they're usually done from the torso up like in Phoenix right for that reason


You know, it never occurred to me that talk sprites should probably have mouths... 
Eh, I still wanted to make bigger sprites as practice.  I got the idea because I made blue guy's shrug animation and didn't feel it was worth posting by itself because it was so simple.


I like the concept though.

The larger (no face) portraits keep the 'mystery' air about the characters, and it could be an interesting style if the pose of the portrait was the thing that did the "talking" and that pose changed (via action lines and whatnot) as the mood changes in the conversation.

Obviously with this approach the "mirroring" of the sprite to match the portrait actually looks "wrong", but the worst offender is that when you show such a nicely-detailed sprite that matches the in-game sprite, you unintentionally make the viewer subconsciously wish that the smaller sprite would be as detailed -- and thus break the overall style of your flat-shaded chars! ( -- very bad btw!)

Regardless, this is a good take on trying something new -- and it allllmost works.


As for your blue dude animation (since we're in the animation forum), it really didn't look like a "shrug" to me. More like a "Come on! I'm open! Try to hit me!" gesture.

Also, for the bigger blue dude, the main thing I see is that the (nearest to us) knee is kind of janky. It doesn't look like there's enough room for his calves to fit to his (particularly chunky) ankle as it flows down to his (seemingly tiny compared to the other) foot.

Outside of these things, the shading looks a bit "off" on the blond girl (there doesn't seem to be any distinct light source, and the lighting shown so far is a bit too heavy to not be from something direct (especially on the nearest-to-us leg). This is clearly not ambient lighting, but that is mostly because the highlight color is so close to the middle color (and doesn't seem to have much sky lighting in its color -- it probably needs to be hue-shifted to the environment's ambient light color a bit). The blue dude's colors seem to be a lot more well-chosen though, so props there.

One other tip -- please remember on the back leg of the "Capcom" style shading, don't be afraid to push it to the darkest color sooner. Usually they reserve 5 color entries (instead of just 3) for areas that have lots of surface-area volumes to cover (such as a legs) -- so an additional darker "red" color entry could help you define the volume better there (rather than making such a stark transition to the black outline.)
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Offline MysteryMeat

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Re: Flourish Animation

Reply #49 on: September 20, 2018, 09:41:03 pm
you know, Astral does have a point! Not enough people let emotive POSES do the talking, rather than the mouths! Might be worth exploring this more as a concept!
PSA: use imgur
http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19838.0 also go suggest on my quest, cmon
MAJOR BORK TALLY: |