AuthorTopic: [WIP] Boulderdash type character animation (Programmer art :S)  (Read 3429 times)

Offline lutas

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Hi all, I'm a programmer attempting to get by with some art and could really use some critique :) This is my player sprite for my next game destined for Xbox 360 community games.



As you can clearly see, the left-right animations are horrendous and I'm not sure where to progress. Can anyone recommend a good tutorial for drawing character animations for this perspective?

I'm very tempted to just pay for professional art but still would like to try and improve anyhow.

Offline AlexWeldon

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Well, first of all, be consistent with your style. In some places you have a black outline, in others you don't. Seen from the front, his head is V-shaped, but from the side, it's more like a Lego-guy's head.

Also, no one stands with their elbows out and their legs spread like that.


Offline JonathanOfDrain

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I don't mean to be rude, but this sprite seriously gives me a head ache. It feels like it's very blurry. What's up with that?

Other than that I think you would really benefit from doing a few sketches with pen(cil) and paper.

Offline Squiggly_P

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It looks like you resized this image horizontally or something (or possibly moved it) and I'm guessing you're using photoshop or something similar, so it' made the piece blurry-looking.  There are a lot of 2D animation resources out there, a lot of it just happens to be made for traditional 2D animators rather than pixel art / sprite animation.

http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=3467.0

There are a few animation tuts in that thread, as well as several other tutorials and articles you'll probably find useful.  I don't know what app you're using for this, but I'd suggest starting out with something that specializes in pixel pushing.  Photoshop will work in a pinch, but it's not the easiert pixelling tool to set up.  Graphics Gale and Pro Motion are probably the most popular apps for pixel work, but I've found Allegro Sprite Editor and Grafx 2 to be pretty solid as well.

You should probably re-pixel this to fix the blurring issue.  It's hard to give anything but basic crits when it's hard to tell if something is AA'd or if it's just a blurring glitch.  I will tell you that in the front-facing walk animation you've got the arms and legs moving together when they should be opposing one another.  Left foot forward + Right arm forward.  You've got it right in the side-view animation, but in the front view the left arm and leg move together, as do the right arm and leg.  There are shading issues as well.  The light on the leg is coming from above in one frame and below in another frame.  It'll be easier to animate if you ignore much of the shading and just focus on the movement first.  Then after the movement is good you can go in and add some shadows or highlights.

So this guy's a cave explorer?  Have you done any character stuff on paper for him?  If you can get him to look about right on paper, you'll probably find it a lot easier to pixel him.

Offline Mathias

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Wow, this is a toubled sprite. When I saw it I first thought you were using wide pixels, due to the accidental wide frontal and back views. Then, realizing it is square pixels I zoomed in and at first thought you had stretched it using smoothing interpolation by accident, something I wouldn't put past a coder, since it's not their field. But I . . . ok wait a minute, I just opened yer sprite sheet in Photoshop and you did smooth stretch it, it has over 256 colors. Haha. oy.

Yeah, well, I hope you saved a version before you stretched it, otherwise it's back to the drawing board.

Moral of the story - you're over your head and have much "studying" to do. Even concerning basic technical graphical issues.