Animation tips

[meekerthanthou]

Hello all,

I'm just starting to develop a small game, and I'm having particular difficulty with animting my protagonist.  I'm using PSP8 for the sprites, and mspaint for the backdrops, because I'm going for a simple style, mainly primary colours.  Anyway, I'm currently just making small changes to my original character drawing, and then compiling a progression of images in a gif animator to preview them before putting them into AGS.  Currently this is very slow and annoying work...  

It would be most awesome if someone with more experience than I could drop some hints on animation techniques for this type of application (my good friend the web let me down on this one).  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

(I'm not tackling anything fancy because animation isn't my strong point (-yet) so as a result none of my characters have legs, most float, but a realistic float animation is hard to make for me).

btw I'm new to the forums but I've been playing AGS games for a long time now and it's a really cool community...  


Javier

[MrColossal]

hello and welcome

have you checked out my tutorials?

http://sylpher.com/kafka

go to games and then tutorials and there are a few there

lemme know if they help

eric

[jannar85]

there's a few in the tutorial section thread, in the critics lounge.
I think 2ma2 deserves some attention too, so http://ilb.notrix.net

Go click on tutorials

[Al_Ninio]

www.freetoon.com

Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair
good book, and FREE.

bonk bonk

[Igor]

If you want to start more seriously with animation, then i suggest to check out Richard Williams's "The Animator's Survival Kit". It's actually even better than Preston's Cartoon Animation. It's not very cheap, but well worth the money. It's not called animation bible for nothing

[MrColossal]

well welll well WELL worth the money

but only if you really want to learn animation or just love reading awesome books

[Darth Mandarb]

I definately agree with Igor and MrColossal ... get the survival kit!

Get it from Amazon.com

It's only 21 bux and, if you're serious about animation, a very necessary investment!

I also have the Preston Blair book and it's great too!

dm

[meekerthanthou]

Wow, thanks everyone, all this is really helpful..

Mr.colossal's tutorials especially... what programs are you using in most of those tutorials?  it looked like photoshop...

[MrColossal]

yup it says in the tutorials that those are all done in photoshop 5.5 but they work for all later versions and i sure many earlier versions