Help at animating this.

[nissouma55]

Hello guys,
I've made a sprite of a character from Naruto "Hinata".
I think I made pretty good work with this, and im super satisfied with it... (Although there's a few things still looking wrong...)

So I've never actually animated much...
I was able to make this :
But that animation was pretty simple.
I d like to animate the first sprite in a "Stance" type of animation, she would just loop a breathing animation, I ve tryed countless times and I just cant do it properly, moving the sprite up or down just 1pixel makes her look like she got bigger, since the sprite is actually very low res...
Help would be very appreciated.

[EduardoPras]

Hello N55! Nice pixelwork, you just lost some volume in her band thing in her leg.

I am not very familiar with Hinata's design but I can try to help you a bit.

I've struggled with your same problem 2 years ago.
The answer to make a more subtle movement is subpixel animation.

Truth be told, that is that is just a fancy name to moving pixels inside the shapes without altering the outline or general format of each part.

I've made an example on how the technique works:



And to talk a little about the turn.

The issue is you've made the key frames but you did not make the inbtweens.

Here's is how I would solve the problem:


 
To solve this you could take a look at some animation books to try to understand the process.
The animator's survival kit is a good example.
But the heart of animation are the splines, in traditional animation the used jargon is timing.

Here's some examples:
https://easings.net/pt-br

Hope this helps you a bit.

[Hoogo]

Hey, I quickly gave it a try. I hope that's what you were looking for, and that it helps in any way!

[Hoogo]

Here's some examples:
https://easings.net/pt-br

No offence to you, but without context, these are un-understandable, I have no clue what all those curves are about and how they relate to animation.

[nissouma55]

That was just me doing everything wrong lol...
I actually managed to fix it :

I really learned a lot in one day, im so happy...
(I had so many wrong stuff in that sprite cant even begin to count...)
PS: Those curves that Eduardo was talking about were functions, acceleration functions. Basically it just said that when there is natural movement, speed woudnt be constant, it would be fast then getting slower or the other way around. And that when I want to move something using animation, I must keep that in mind. It did actually help me...

[CFKaligula]

I think there a lot of cool stuff you can do with this stance, i tried just making her circle with her arms and body. Not sure if this is what you are going for with the animation, you could also make her just have very strong breathing, which can be done by just changing the timing of the frames. Was very fun working on this tho.