Walk Cycle Problems

[Play_Pretend]

Hey all!  I've been tweaking and tweaking this walk cycle, and it just looks so screwed up to me.  It looks like the legs are jerking and the feet just aren't moving right, but every time I try to improve it, it just seems to make things worse.  :o

And please forgive the horrid GIF animation...I can't figure out how to export it from Jasc Animation Shop, Flash 8, Moho or any other animation program that doesn't screw up the clarity and alpha channel.  It's crystal-clear in-game.  I included a zip file with the original Paint Shop Pro 7 vectors and transparent PNGs for each file in case anyone wants to try to improve it, which I would greatly appreciate.

Any thoughts/ideas/help?  Please??

Original Art Files Here

[Tuomas]

Well first of all, it seems to be lacking frames. I mean the way how the legs come from in front and shoot to the back very quickly. Can't really tell now, but it might make a big difference, usually does. However, this is just a suggestion, because I really like the animation as it is.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

It's not lacking frames at all, just a better distribution of movements between frames.  I made an edit to take some of that into consideration as well as a few other issues.

1.  Reduced color count to 32 (from 256!!).  You are using way, way too many colors for a sprite of this complexity.  It could be easily represented in 10 colors or less.

2.  Made both feet drop down to the same position.  You had the distant leg considerably higher up on the down step but then it reached the level of the other leg as it moved back.  This created an awkward look visually.

3.  Made the legs lift more as they moved forward.  The increased motion makes it easier for the eye to see both legs independently.

4.  Altered the arm sway to be more in tune with the leg motion and made the torso tilt somewhat to show the distant shoulder.





The walk cycle itself is pretty good but my advice is to stay far away from the antialias tool.  You're wasting colors here and the unnecessary smoothing of everything makes animation an unnecessary chore.  Keep at it!

[Play_Pretend]

Thanks guys!  I see what you mean about the feet being out of adjustment, I was worried that looked funny too.  I also thought his torso and arms looked really rigid, and I like the more flexible way you showed it.

I'm not sure what you mean about the antialiasing...when I export my frames from PSP7 as PNGs with alpha channels, they come out smooth and beautiful in the game (nothing like the GIF I posted here).  We might be talking about two different things here, but since all my art is done in vectors, all I have to do is node edit the shapes of the body during animation, and they're automatically antialiased by PSP7 to begin with.  It's really easy, like having a posable model I can take snapshots of instead of having to repaint every frame like with pixellated drawing or other computer painting styles.

Heh, I don't even pay attention to how many colors I use ...you should've seen him before, though, he was a lot paler and less defined.  I just started working with a new background artist, and I've been updating my characters' colors and looks now that I can see how pale and awful they look against his well-colored bg's.  Something else weird - I brought him up in PSP7 and used the "Count Colors Used" option, and it said he has 1029 colors?  Is that because of the smoothed edges?  Unless there are some I don't know about or counted wrong, his intended lines and fills (without counting smoothed edge colors) should only be about 14.

Thanks a lot for the help, I really do appreciate it...now to go and try to edit my character frames to be closer to yours...on with my learning process!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Yes, the smoothing/aliasing is why your color count is so high.