A question about workflow and another about smooth animation

[majicpotion]

A quick question about my workflow for animation. Is it sensible?

I sketch an animated sequence on paper with a simple lightbox and scan in the frames. I trace it with graphics gale because it has pixel perfect precision with its smooth line tool.
I noticed, that this takes alot of time. The tracing I mean. However, most other techniques for cleaning up lineart (such as contrast, brightness) are best for higher resolutions.
That's all I know about game art at this point. I can't work with a tablet, so I stick with pencil and pen.

Any comments on the workflow I would appreciate. Good? Bad? Is there a better way? etc.

My other question is about smooth animation. Sorry, I did not mention this, but as a side note - I'm just starting out with asset art. I noticed that when moving a single static image in a walk, in the editor when the game is launched to test, it is very jumpy. Very uncomfortable to look at. I figured, as soon as I have more frames for a walk cycle, it will be more pleasing to look at. I wanted an opinion on how I could implement any techniques to make sure that I calculate for a smooth animation. Is there a good way to plan this? There are lot's of walk cycle tuts out there, so I'm not asking for an art lesson, but if its the kind of example you have, please post it. More so, I would like to figure out what kind of other difficulties I might run into as far as animation is concerned.

My personal goal is original King's Quest style graphics enhanced for a better resolution. So I would like to keep things more cartoony, but colors and shading very simple. So 320x* and etc. would not be a good starting point to scale up from since the views need a larger surface area to composite the scenes. I even went as far as 1024x768, but the scaling system is hard to judge.

Any help whatsoever as advice for reaching my goal, would be great!

[Cassiebsg]

Maybe post one or two pieces?
Have a feeling that you're sprites might just be too big and heavy. I'm also using one single sprite for all my NPCs (haven't bothered to do walk cycles for them yet), and they "glide" just fine with the walk command.

[Monsieur OUXX]

My personal goal is original King's Quest style graphics enhanced for a better resolution. So I would like to keep things more cartoony, but colors and shading very simple. So 320x* and etc. would not be a good starting point to scale up from since the views need a larger surface area to composite the scenes. I even went as far as 1024x768, but the scaling system is hard to judge

I didn't quite understand what final resolution you're targetting. Are you planning on using the existing backgrounds "as-is", scale them up, and then draw more-detailed character sprites?
You must decide what resolution you target because it will condition everything, from your drawing workflow to some technical things (such as programming). Keep in mind that you cannot change an AGS game's resolution after you've started it.
Nowadays, 640x480 and 800x600 are obsolete for hi-res. Even that has become too low. So either yous tick to 320x200, or you scale it up using proper pixel filters such as hq3x.

1) I sketch an animated sequence on paper with a simple lightbox and scan in the frames.
2) I trace it with graphics gale because it has pixel perfect precision with its smooth line tool.
I noticed, that this takes alot of time. The tracing I mean.

Yes, tracing is very long. But I can see that you also have a concern for anti-alisaing (smooth lines).
Maybe you could:
1)  color your drawings directly on the paper (at least the base colors, using 3 or 4 colors),
2) scan them at twice the resolution( e.g. if your final sprite is 100x100, start off with a 200x200 scan),
3) apply basic filters to quickly fix the colors (e.g. "posterize", contrast, etc.) and remove any rogue pixels (no smooth lines!!! your psrites should be as sharp as possible)
4) only finally scale down the sprite to 50% its size (to create smooth-lines-but-not-too-smooth) and draw the details manually
Then again this possible workflow might be completely inappropriate since I don't know what resolution you're aiming.

My other question is about smooth animation.I noticed that when moving a single static image in a walk, in the editor when the game is launched to test, it is very jumpy. Very uncomfortable to look at. I figured, as soon as I have more frames for a walk cycle, it will be more pleasing to look at. I wanted an opinion on how I could implement any techniques to make sure that I calculate for a smooth animation.

The thing with animations is that adding frames does not necessarily make it more smooth. What makes an animation smooth is to draw frames only for important positions. Every quick move inbetween important positions doesn't need a frame.
A typical example: In a side walkcycle, the most important frames are the ones where the character throws his leg forward, because he's quick in doing that, and then he's much slower to bring his body forward just above his foot.
If you miss that frame with the leg fully strecthed forward, then no matter how many intermediate frames you draw, the animation will look clunky. However if you have all the important frames, even very few frames can fool the eye and look fluid.

[Snarky]

My other question is about smooth animation. Sorry, I did not mention this, but as a side note - I'm just starting out with asset art. I noticed that when moving a single static image in a walk, in the editor when the game is launched to test, it is very jumpy. Very uncomfortable to look at. I figured, as soon as I have more frames for a walk cycle, it will be more pleasing to look at.

By default, walking characters don't "glide" across the background pixel by pixel, because that looks weird. Instead, their movement is linked to their animation.

The "jumpiness" of the walking animation has to do with two settings: AnimationDelay and MovementSpeed. These are set on a per-character basis, and determine the delay between each time the animation frame is updated (which is also when character position is updated, if MovementLinkedToAnimation is set to true), and how far it moves each time.

If your character is 100 pixels tall, it should probably move about 80 pixels in one loop (two steps) of the left-right walkcycle, since step length is typically about 0.4*height. So if your walkcycle has 10 frames, you should set MovementSpeed to 8, and then adjust AnimationDelay to get a reasonable walking speed. If the frame delay is not too high (stay below 4), it should look pretty smooth.

[blippie]

I was out for a while, so I'm late in responding. Thanks for the great posts. Later tonight I will try to post an example of what I'm doing. I just recently started over, so I'm working from the ground up (just test scenes). I looked at what you guys said and it is very informative to me. I have some questions (some new ones also).

Monsieur OUXX: you said the following -

4) only finally scale down the sprite to 50% its size (to create smooth-lines-but-not-too-smooth) and draw the details manually
Then again this possible workflow might be completely inappropriate since I don't know what resolution you're aiming.

I'm a little confused by what you mean by scaling down and then drawing details manually? Can you clarify that?

Another question. I tried scaling with a pixel thin character. You guys might know, that as the character gets smaller, the sprite get's broken up and looks like it's fragmented. I think what I would have to do is have anti-aliased sprites, correct?

Since, I'm not going to tinker with betas right now, I will have to stick to 1024x768 (max for ags 3.3.0), but I will try to work with 720p or even 1080p in the future. So for now, that is my target resolution. What would be a good pixel size to aim for, per character, assuming some average scene scale at 1024x768.

Finally, I'm very interested in Monsieur OUXX's, steps 1 - 4. They are self explanatory, but I would like to ask, if anyone can post a quick step by step example (screenshots) as explained, so I can maybe see some workflows for a character and scene.

[blippie]

ps, I changed usernames, since I could not update my old account - I used to use majicpotion, but I use blippie now - sorry if it confused anyone. I'll contact a mod to delete the old account since I can't access it.

[blippie]

Here is a background I'm testing. I blockout in 3d using blender and trace with graphics gale, then color with gimp. This is the style (pic 2) exactly what I'm looking for. Except as I said, I discovered, that at this level you can't scale a character or it breaks up. So, I'm thinking of redoing this with antialiasing, but I would love to avoid it.

[blippie]

Here is a rough sample character (engineer) before tracing. After tracing 1 pixel thin, scaling the character breaks it up like I said. So I'm trying to get more tips on what to do. I want to make sure I have it straight before I animate the character.

[selmiak]

just out of interest, how long did it take you until you could model such stuff in blender?

[Monsieur OUXX]

Something unrelated to the question you asked, but very important: will you sue the regular perspective as seen in the colored rendering of your scene, or will you use the axonometric perspective seen in the B&W version? If you use the axonometric one, everything is fine. Otherwise, with the other perspective, you'll need to draw a much larger sprite, because the character will be very close to the camera if he walks to in the foreground of the room.

4) only finally scale down the sprite to 50% its size (to create smooth-lines-but-not-too-smooth) and draw the details manually
Then again this possible workflow might be completely inappropriate since I don't know what resolution you're aiming.

I'm a little confused by what you mean by scaling down and then drawing details manually?

Will you want to keep all the black lines in your final sprite? If yes, the workflow I suggested doesn't suit your needs. I can't really see how you could keep all those one-pixel-thick lines without manually drawing them on each sprite.
My personal philosophy is always that there should be a process as automated and repetitive as possible, with each step as simple as possible.
Therefore maybe you could draw your psrites in a way that, after you scan them, all you have to do is apply that kind of photoshop filters, possibly several filters (to clean up the result each time more), and only then start coloring or applying other effects.