Character + Animation

Started by SilverSpook, Thu 11/09/2014 14:05:05

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SilverSpook



First ever character drawn 2D.  Protagonist/CEO Clovis Stanniston -- esquire-turned-neofeudal lord.  Fully armored in stature suit. 

Plus my first ever 2D pixel-by-pixel animation!  I've been just duplicating the original image and moving the arms and legs around with the lasso.  Then saving out each frame as an individual PNG.  Does that make sense or is there a pretty simple easier way to go about animating?

Ghost

If your paint program has layers you can easily keep upper/lower arms and legs on seperate layers, duplicate and manipulate those and always keep a backup of the original. I admit that I only work in low-res and tend to create most images from scratch, but in a higher resolution the approach makes a lot of sense.

I do like the overall character design and it matches your screen sample from the other thread nicely. The animation is a bit rough around the edges though. Arm movement looks smoother than legs. The torso should move to the sides a little, and the folds of the suit should probably show up more. But it is a pretty good start- I'd happily play a game looking like this!

Cassiebsg

Funny, I think the legs look better than the arms, mostly cause they are cleaner and the shadow/highlighting transmit the shape and movement nicely.
The arms need cleaning up in the shoulders and elbows, and the hands should be smaller when they are further away. The shadowing also should change accordingly... As for torso and stuff see Ghost's post.

But the figure looks great, and if you can get it cleaned up, and I'm sure you can, then you'll get a great character there. :)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

SilverSpook

Thanks Cassie and Ghost for the feedback and tips for improvement!

Glad to know that you'd play the game in the event it is completed!

Yeah the more I look at the animation playing, the more I see the sharp edges and strangeness popping up, I'll have to go "iron out" his suit a bit later...

Monsieur OUXX

Not bad but you made the beginner's mistake: the head is not moving up and down. BAsically there should be two frames where the head is lowered a bit (each time the foot hits the floor)
 

Snarky

And further to that: it's not that the head should bob up and down like the neck is becoming longer and shorter. The whole torso should move, from the hips up. (The lowering of the body comes from bending the legs and twisting the hips.)

SilverSpook

Way belated thanks, Snarky and Monsieur for the head bobbery tip. 

Here's another crack at the animation, this time the protagonist is rocking it from the side perspective.  Now with more headbanging!  Bobbing!


Bavolis

I find tracking the arms is working well, but the legs are a bit harder to follow. Making the back leg/foot (and the arm, too) a shade darker will probably go a long way to help the brain sort out the cycle. I think you're using a cut and paste of the same hands and shoes (could be wrong), so it's easy to get lost without the shade difference.

Cassiebsg

What Bavolis says...
I do miss a bit more natural swing for the arms and hands, they look like a robot that can't bend the arms at the elbow/pulse. But in the end, it all depends on how much natural and detail you going for.

Otherwise is looking good. :)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Bavolis

I think the robotic swing works in a "stiff guy in a suit" kind of way :)

SilverSpook

@Bavolis & Cassiebsg: Thanks for the feedback!  I'll see about darkening a leg and possibly try loosening his screws a bit :)


Snarky

I think you should try to keep the body "stable" in the walk cycle. So in the front cycle, he shouldn't jerk to the left in a couple of frames, and in the side cycle the body should only be moving up and down, not backwards and forwards. (There are lots of good references, both video and animated, on YouTube.)

Apart from cleaning up that:
-He seems to be leaning back a bit. While that helps him seem stiff, he also looks off-balance.
-The leaning may have something to do with the legs not going back far enough. I'd try extending the back position of the leg a little further.
-Currently there's no joint between the leg and the foot. You need that to make it look natural (and ideally another joint for the toes, particularly when the foot is leaving the ground).
-Is the knee maybe a tiny bit too far down the leg?

Otherwise it's looking pretty good! I'm not generally a fan of "paper doll" animations with parts merely cut out and rotated, but this works pretty well.

SilverSpook

@Snarky: Thanks for the tips!  How do you do animation yourself, if you don't cut out and rotate parts?  Genuinely curious because I have very little experience animating and want to learn the various tricks of the trade. 

Snarky

Oh, I am not an animation expert by any means, and what little I have done has mostly been in low-res, where what I do is simply erase the moving parts and redraw them.

The traditional way to make high-resolution or handdrawn animation is to work from wireframes: draw the animation frame by frame as a skeleton or "blob shape" (not necessarily every frame, but at least the key frames at the start/end and "most extreme" points of the movement: for a walkcycle, that would probalbly be the frames where each foot touches the ground, and the one in the middle of the step), then add more and more detail to the outline. Don't start filling in or texturing until the animation is more or less finished.

Obviously people combine various approaches, and a certain amount of copying helps with efficiency, but the more you actually draw instead of "pose" in paper-doll fashion, the less stiff and more realistic it's going to look.

SilverSpook

#14
I'm using Bavolis' excellent player character animation in the Knobbly Crook as a reference at this point, since he's one of the few high-resolution AGS games out there (1024x768), which is what mine is in.  I did actually add in changes to the character's arms and legs in each frame so it's not just a Flash-style 2d animation with bones and children, but more could be added, I think.  The feet do actually rotate but it's probably not enough to be really noticable to the player.  I might add some lighting changes to the character in each frame and probably some more joint movements, in the foot and also the hands.

Bavolis

Just be careful - O'Sirus moves like he's on 30 cups of coffee! I'm definitely not animation trained, but I have a "clutter" style that masks a lot of my flaws by confusing the human brain :)

I remember when I was working on it, I found a few "walk cycle" tutorials on the internet that really helped, too. Even the ones that are just stick figures are great at pointing out the key frames.

SilverSpook

Yeah I had an animation sheet with the anatomically-correct poses and everything that I was basing my walk on, six frames I think.  Just tried to make sure every frame was in the ballpark of the manikin. :)

Dread Spectacle

Your animation is off to a good start but needs some refinement in a couple of areas.  When doing an animation your poses should adhere to some sort of baseline. It looks like you tried to create an up and down bob motion by simply moving your poses within the frame. I added a stable baseline in this paintover so that you can see where a surface should be.  I also added a toe bend in frame 1 and 4.  You should fix the other two frames where  his toe goes below where the baseline is. Remember that your character will be moving against a background (not within a gif frame). I added some reference lines at his nose so that you can see his that he only moves up and down. Reference lines like this help me alot when animating to keep things where they should be, you might give them a try.

Matti

Not sure if you're going for a realistic look, but he has very short legs and as Snarky pointed out, the knees are a tad too low.

SilverSpook

Hm, I could raise the knees but I think perhaps the legs appear shorter because they're covered in part by the suit.  I used a human model for the body part sizes and positioning so maybe it's just the suit isn't moving in the right place?





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