Animating gears

[mouthuvmine]

Hey, guys. I need to animate these gears, but it's not going well. I'm not sure if there was a better way to have shaped them to facilitate this. This was all I could come up with at this size, and the size is pretty important. I think even just three fames would suffice, but I can't seem to get a satisfactory second frame. Suggestions?





If the perspective looks a little weird, it's supposed to be inset into a wall, viewed from the right of it.

[frenchllama]

Maybe try to put some kind of horizontal and vertical line through each cog, like 4 spokes in the wheel (or more, depends how it looks) to show the rotation more clearly? Then the teeth wont need to be so perfectly animated.

[zabnat]

I agree that adding something more to the cogs to indicate movement will help a lot. Also I would suggest that you draw and animate the cog from the front view and then add perspective to it and clean up the pixels after that.

[Evil]

You only really need to animate the big one. The little ones you can just shift the colors on the sides a bit and it'll look like it's moving.

I'd suggest layering a second cog over the first, rotating it so the teeth are interlocking and redraw the edge. You'll probably need three frames, so it doesn't just look like it's moving back and forth. That is, depending on how fast it's going.

[markbilly]

Add a little bit of up and down motion to the big one, too. Just one pixel. If it's an old cog system you've fixed (in an adventure game, that's fairly likely!) it should look authentic then....