Canvas Sizing for animation

[Tyshalle]

Sorry if this isn't in the right place, but since I'm not asking for specific criticism on art so much as general advice this seemed like the best place.

I've done a little bit of animation for my game so far, and one of the consistent problems I've had is in figuring out how big to make the canvas around the character. For a good long while it seems like any time the character moves, his character sort of shakes back and forth. I figured out that this was a canvas sizing problem, since differing widths of the picture can put the center of the character in different areas. I managed to get the character's walking animation looking smooth, but I'm not convinced my technique is going to hold up in the long run. When I was doing a search here before I made this thread I saw some people mentioning running into problems if they made their canvas width too wide, and I could see that being a problem for me too.

Basically my technique thus far has been to bring the bottom and top of the canvas so that it's touching the pixels of the character. But for the right and left sides, I've been keeping them exactly the same across the board for the animation. So for instance, if in Frame 1 my character is 190 pixels tall, and 46 pixels wide, but in frame 4 of this same animation my character is 190 pixels tall and 78 pixels wide, then I should probably have all of the frames within that animation be 78 pixels wide. But is this the best way to go about it?

My concern is that, let's say I stick to the 78 pixels wide thing, but then later on I decide I want my character to point a sword at another character, and the sword pointing frame turns out to be 150 pixels wide or something. Is that going to suddenly bite me in the butt and now I have to make all of my animations for this character 150 pixels wide, to make sure that when he points the sword he doesn't appear to suddenly teleport back 50 pixels or whatever?

It seems like there's got to be something pitifully simple about this process that I'm just overlooking, so I figured I'd ask now before I get too far with the art.

As always, thanks for all the advice!

[David Ostman]

My workflow is 3D that I render out to sprites, but the problem should be the same for everyone. What I've done so far is give my sprites a lot of free space around them when I import them into AGS. Then select all the frames of your animations, for example all the frames in your walk-to-the-right loop, right click and choose "Crop sprite edges (symmetrically)", and this usually takes care of this issue for me.

[Andail]

Just expand the canvas equally on both sides whh it needs resizing and you should be fine.

[Tyshalle]

This seems to have worked out really well. Thanks a ton.

So would it be a good idea then to say, save all of my character images as 200x200 (or whatever?) and then simply run that Crop sprite edges (symmetrically) thing? It seems like it'll only run it if the selected images are exactly the same height/width.

In a related question, have any of you run into this weird issue where your character sort of, uh, inflates and deflates during an animation by one or two pixels? I'm noticing this occasionally. It seems to have stopped now that I used this technique, so maybe it was just due to odd canvas sizing, but I noticed that my character would like, get 1 or 2 pixels wider on like, the 3rd frame of a loop or something. When I look at the View preview, I'll strangely see the opposite thing, where the outer edge of my image on each side will get cut off by a pixel. Is this just because of odd canvas sizing, or is there something else going on here that I should be doing something specific to prevent?

[Khris]

Does this happen while the character is scaled? Maybe it's a rounding thing.