AuthorTopic: Animation Attempts  (Read 2998 times)

Offline brod

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Animation Attempts

on: August 23, 2008, 07:26:19 pm
Hello, today I found new inspiration to being programming a new, platform sword fighting game. So I made these few animations, which I've already programmed in. I just wanted to get some opinions from veteran pixel artists on what I can improve on.

I am using blobbing to animate. The character will not look like this forever, it just helps me animate.

Moving - Character walks


Combo 1 - Character pulls out weapon and strikes


Combo 2 - Character spins and strikes from side


Combo 3 - Character leaps and attacks enemies in-air


That's currently all the animations I have finished.

If you'd like to see these attacks in-game, you can download the early beta here.

Thanks for reading!

Offline Dokozai

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Re: Animation Attempts

Reply #1 on: August 23, 2008, 07:30:53 pm
The animations are very smooth, but they seem a bit dull to me, needs more motion and life to it!

The motion blur looks fine too.
 :)

Offline Willows

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Re: Animation Attempts

Reply #2 on: August 24, 2008, 06:57:25 pm
The walk is strong, but the other three animations... well, they don't really make sense :D

Sure, they read and you can tell what they're doing, but the actions themselves that this lil guy is performing are unnatural. Take the sword swipe (combo1) for example. He pulls out his sword (...or at least it says he does, though I couldn't tell you from where) and swings downward, and... squats? Why does he squat? And why does his other arm go back?

A good thing to do would be to act these out yourself a whole bunch of times and pay attention to what you do. Myself, when I swing my imaginary sword, I tend to twist and use my shoulders a bunch if I'm just using one hand, but if I'm going for the FWARRMMMG power overhead chop, my body hits a windup pose the ends with me bending back something like this

)

and releasing all that bent tension with a big fat forward chop that I can't convey too well with text characters. But it'd be something like this

<



The grand point I'm making, then, is that for every ACTION there is an equal and opposite REACTION. The same is true for animation, with an added lifelike note of "For every ACTION there is an ANTICIPATION". What I mean by this is that in order for a character to go UP, he must first go DOWN. In order for a character to swing a sword FORWARD, he must first draw it BACK.

A jump is the easiest place to see this in action. Go, right now (if noone is looking ;)) and jump as high as you can, straight up. Note how far you bent down in order to store up enough energy to jump so high. That's anticipation. Now do a small hop forward, and pay attention to both how far you squat and what your arms are doing. Your arms should go back in order to anticipate your forward motion, and you should squat a little to store the energy to propel yourself up a bit. See? Anticipation applies to almost any action and helps your animations look more real and fluid.

As a final note, your poor combo2's feet are sliding. I'd suggest acting that one out, too, to find a natural and believable motion for a spin-chop.

Cheers!