underwater character

[boojiboy]

This is a character for use in a game.
I want to get the design right before I start animating, obviously.

This is the one I'll probably go with (after it's improved a bit of course).


Here is the design I did before this.


And here's the original.


The first would be the easiest to animate. But let me know which one you think is best.

[willfaulds]

I much prefer your original 2nd design...

Here's where I'd start to take it - I made a WIP to help illustrate the points...

Main thoughts are you should stick with the original design as is has loads more character. But I suppose it may not be the right kind of character for your project.

I couldn't decided if the little guy on top was a turtle or cuddly toy - my edit doesn't do him justice.

Frame 1 is rescaling non proportionally using 'Nearest Neighbor'


EDIT/

[boojiboy]

I didn't go with the second design because I didn't think I'd be able to scale it down well enough (the original design was the one on the bottom by the way).

I think I will go with that design. Coloring seems to be my problem right now, but I'll post another edit before I get on to that.

[boojiboy]

I'm glad I ended up going with that design.
willfaulds: I hope it's ok that I stole that chest belt thing, he really needed something like that.

So, colors and shading. As you can probably tell it's not my strong point.

[StupidStudios]

Hey, that's nice, but how will you make your left-moving sprite? I mean, you can't simply flip it, that'd be total resource-rape. Oh, and I'll start working on the engine tomorrow, because it's 20:12 where I live, and I'm just making my final forum-round.

Oh, and sorry, I don't know shit about this forum and it's rules, I'm really sorry if I broke some rules.

[boojiboy]

I don't know if I like where there is going.

[Fidsah]

Something you may want to think about as you choose your colors are the backgrounds of the game. Since an underwater background might contain quite a few blues and greens, you'll want the colors of the character able to be easily separated from the ambient tones. You may consider making a mockup of typical background, just to get a feel for how well the colors you choose fit in to everything around them.

[boojiboy]

Fidsah : Yeah thanks. That's one of my problems. The backgrounds will, at this stage be have a lot of black and be fairly simple but I will have to change the colors of the character.

http://www.box.net/shared/ktniiq8mc9

Sorry I don't have a program to loop this or play at a rate I want.
But before I clean it up, add the the rest of the costume, are there any fundamental problems with this run cycle.
Too many frames? Remember it's supposed to be underwater so he won't be running that quick.

EDIT: Ugh I don't even know how to upload an animation. Can someone tell me the best way to do that? In the mean time, if anyone can be bothered, there's a link to the file.

[Fidsah]

Here's a looped animation for you:



I'm not sure what program you use, but in GIMP, it's as easy as saying Loop Forever when saving the GIF. As for hosting, photobucket works well enough for me.

The run cycle looks pretty good to me, good shoulder and hip rotation. However, when the image loops, it looks like his lower body gets a lot bigger suddenly. Here's an animation of just the last frame moving into the first frame again, you should be able to see it:

[boojiboy]

Thanks for the tips Fidsah.
 Here's an update


Just trying to get the animation right still.
But also cleaning up the head.
How is it?

EDIT: He moves his head to the right too soon, doesn't he? I'll fix that for the next update.