[ C+C ] first animation attempt

[drax013]

I wasn't trying for bounce     but now that you mention it it dose look bouncy. I was just trying to elongate and shrink the shadow as the slime stretched out a bit.... hmmmm

[eishiya]

Try drawing your slime relative to a floor (perhaps with a simple checkerboard pattern) in the same perspective/projection as the game environment. It's harder to make believably motion without context, which is probably why you ended up with it looking like a bounce - the slime's not consistently attached to any sort of ground/floor.

[drax013]

that is a great idea! i will attempt it later today. My perspective is 3/4 view rpg style game so i will see what I can do

[eishiya]

In a 3/4 view, we'd be seeing as much of the top of the character as of their side. Your slime views all look closer to side view than 3/4 view, so that's something to work on.

[drax013]

noted! ya i have been having a hard time getting the view right. either it looks like its from the side or to much from the top 

[drax013]

did a really quick mock up, is this a better angle?

[eishiya]

I think it's a better angle, but it feels rather top-down rather than 3/4. It could work if the slime is meant to have very little height.

Can you get your hands on some putty? Sculpting it in 3D that you can easily hold in your hands and rotate might help you get a better feel for how the slime should look in 3/4 and in other angles. With any object, being able to conceptualise it in 3D helps a lot with drawing it at any angle.

Another exercise that could also help is drawing the slime's "footprint" in 3/4 view (so if the slime were circular, the footprint would be an oval rather than a circle), and then building up the rest of the slime on top of that. You could also try drawing simpler 3D forms in 3/4 view to get a feel for working with that projection and thinking in 3D before moving on to more complex, compound shapes like that slime. Drawing amorphous forms is actually quite challenging, and isn't a great starting point.

[drax013]

yes I can get a hold of some modeling clay, and will.  being a slime its not supposed to be to big but not tiny or flat either... The foot print idea is also very helpful and I will give that a try as well. That all being said this is not intended to be a monster but a playable character. From all the ones I have seen via google searches and spriters it seems like  most playable characters are closer to a side view? but not actually a side view....   

[eishiya]

Are you looking at side-view games or 3/4 games? Don't rely on Google to tell the difference.
Plus, a lot of artists simply get it wrong, since 3/4 isn't a common angle for humans to see the world from xP When people post their 3/4 sprites for critique, almost always the main critique is that they accidentally did a side-view. It makes sense that they would, we're all used to seeing people from the side/eye-level.
It's true that 3/4 characters are usually drawn with the camera actually a little bit lower (this is the case even for environment objects, not just characters) since that usually looks better, but if it's too low, then the characters look like they're lying on the ground rather than standing on it. This is an issue seen even in some published games, and can easily happen as the result of the characters being drawn in isolation from the environment. Always work with a mockup instead of drawing elements on their own.

[drax013]

 sound advice. I tried the foot print idea you gave me and while the do look better i kind of feel like I just made eggs with eyes  , adding a background tile did seem to help a little too.

 
I am trying to do something a little different than the regular slime look....

here is the one I did after making a clay model of the slime. This one came out pretty good i think!! The model really did help!


 Here are some of the things I was looking at for reference...