AuthorTopic: Animating a Toad Boss for an RPG (WIP)  (Read 2833 times)

Offline PresidentLeever

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Animating a Toad Boss for an RPG (WIP)

on: September 14, 2007, 05:38:23 am
Hello everyone. This is my first post here, though Ive been lurking for some time.. watching, learning.. ;)

Anyway, this sprite will be the first boss for an RPG project. It's being developed for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis console, so there are some limits like 16 colors per sprite, and only 30 blocks of 32x32 pixels per enemy for animations.




So far I've done "hurt" and "spit/lick" animations, C&C for these are very much apreciated!
Also, I'm going to start working on a charge animation (think rhino charge) but I'm really new to this so I was wondering if you guys had any tips for me?

Offline baccaman21

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Re: Animating a Toad Boss for an RPG (WIP)

Reply #1 on: September 14, 2007, 09:12:06 am
First things first... you need to consolidate your pallette.

You know you only have 15 colors to play with (excluding the mask color -[which incidentally should be index color 0, or the first color in each bank of 16 colors])  anyway, on some frames the count is up to 18, and the final frame 19! - So you need to be careful when making those edits... I'm not sure how you've managed to duplicate colors like this but you have... so be aware.

I've taken the liberty to convert your pallette to a decent range... and I've consolidated it across the sequence of frames for you. (In promotion theres a single palette feature across animations that maintains the pallette integrity from frame to frame making it easier to not screw up)



Your mask color is now in the correct place... (Color 0) and there's no duplicate colors... it's now easy to see where those extra colors were used. (when you cut and paste the head to 'animate' it)

May I point out what I feel is a major flaw in your graphic? Look at how many colors you're dedicating to the toes...? there's 6 colors there? That's a helluva lot of colors to be used on such a small surface area... where inversely you've used 4 colors of pinky/purple on the main body. I'd rethink this. Asthetically you'd be seeing more of the body than the toes, so dedicate more of you limited color pallette to making this less gritty... plus you've got two spare colors...

Now as far as animation's concerned you've been told what by your programmer? there's only 30 blocks of 32x32 pixels per enemy... riiight....



This is how you should try and visualise your graphics when it comes to storing them and your own personal limits. In terms of a Megadrive/genesis they store Graphic data in chunks of memory of 256x256 pixels at a time. This is then split into characters of 8x8 pixels, and each character then has an associated pallette register chosen from 16 banks of 16 colors each. But you know this already don't you? It's been a while for me to be honest and I can't recall how banks of these 256x256 pixels a Megadrive has in memory at any one time, I know it's more than 1... but might be around 4... I'm not sure... you'll have to check with your coder. We used to dedicate banks to various aspects of the screen, so 1 bank would be for the Backgrounds, another would be for Sprites, Another would be for the Fonts and HUD and so on...

What I'm presenting to you here is a way for you to visualize memory physically in terms of how much you've got to play with. It may help you in the long run for the duratoin of the project.

Incidentally, your using 11 frames so far of the allocated amount. But there's a LOT of repeated characters so hopefully if your coder has a decent character stripping tool then you may get some frames to play with. Depends on his tools.

But that's by the by... first thing you need to sort is that pallette. I'd use less black too. And be aware that the background color is similar to some colors in the pallette - a good rule of thumb (to avoid messing up your masks) is to make color zero something garish that isn't a part of the color scheme of you sprite... I'd go fro bright green myself...

I've wittered enough... I'll leave you to it...
« Last Edit: September 14, 2007, 09:13:37 am by baccaman21 »
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Offline PresidentLeever

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Re: Animating a Toad Boss for an RPG (WIP)

Reply #2 on: September 14, 2007, 10:56:52 am
First things first... you need to consolidate your pallette.

...

...so dedicate more of you limited color pallette to making this less gritty... plus you've got two spare colors...



Oh.. heh, okay looks like I messed up a bit. Sorry for wasting your time on something irrelevant, and yes I did know most of this stuff you're telling me. I have no idea how the color problem happened though. When making the animation I first used photoshop to convert each image to a .gif and then made the animation in imageready (that's where the repeated characters are from I guess). Something must've happened along the way, because I used a single palette (below) the whole time.



This is the sheet I've been given to work with (the other sprites aren't mine btw). I suppose you can figure it out yourself as you seem very knowledgeable in this stuff, sounds like you've actually developed for this console? Also, I forgot to tell you that it is a Mega CD game, so some of the tech specs may differ to what you know but what I said originally is true. The programmer also urged me to keep animations to 3-4 frames maximum.

On the grittyness, well, it fits the background well.. and the spare colors will be used for metal parts that aren't finished. I suppose the black could be slightly brighter? A problem is I don't have access to a full MD palette, I just pick colors from screenshots when making monsters, and character palettes (2 palettes used for all characters) are already predefined since before I joined the project.

The head animation isn't just cut & paste, but I used that when making it.. is that a problem?

Offline baccaman21

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Re: Animating a Toad Boss for an RPG (WIP)

Reply #3 on: September 14, 2007, 02:14:17 pm
Yes I've had a bit of experience with Megadrive and Gamegear (which is similar), I did some on the MicroMachines 2 on Megadrive, and about 3 other MD starter projects that never saw light of day for Codemasters back in the early 90's.

Ok So, I see you've got 1/2 a bank to do your sprites in. (256x128) - having said that there's lot's of blank tiles so in effect you'll have alot more space in the bank than I'm suggesting, the coder will have said this to you to keep things simple but there are better methods of sprite grabbing and compression that is far to complex to go into here. Boy that's one nasty ass pallette (yuck)

I should have said before that the toad boss is quite nicely pixelled... but that pallette don't help. I'm not sure about the process using photoshop... I don't use pshop to do 8 bit gfx... I use an 8 bit gfx package to do 8bit gfx... less complicated and less prone to errors. 

RE: animating using a cut&paste isn't wrong, it's just that I've got so used to using trad cel based techniques that I find cut and paste crude... but each to their own.

Buy the book - The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams

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