art/animation question

[Mouth for war]

Hey! I was just wondering..I kind of suck at doing animations and now i was thinking about something. I have this guy and he's sitting at a tree looking stupid...sometimes i just want him to tilt his head up and down a little then maybe say something etc. I dont want to redraw the entire head for such a small thing really...it would probably look off model for every frame as well. And since rotating pictures F*** up the pictures i was wondering if vectorizing would be a good idea? I want to keep the original head and just have it a bit rotated to the left and right for him to be able to look up and down. My last option is to draw the character, print him then rotate the paper and scan it but that feels like unnecessary work. What's the best alternative for a crappy artist like me? Hope you know what i mean. Thanks

[Snake]

Vectors? Blargh...

For him looking up and down a little, this should only take a couple frames. In the end, MFW, you'll be more pleased with your work than vectors.

I could be out of bounds in suggestioning this, like say it's a flash animation or anything out of an AGS game. Is this for a game?

Anyway, that is my personal opinion. The animations don't have to be perfectly smooth with 10+ frames. Make at least two frames for each action and delay the animation a couple seconds.

Shit, man, anime gets away with it

[Mouth for war]

Oh sorry yes it's for a ags game the guy sits against a tree and it's a side view

[Ryan Timothy B]

I'm definitely not an animating pro, but one thing I do know is that I can get by with rotating.



For this image (that I released for the 'release something thread') I rotated each part of his body individually.  From ankle to knee, the shoe, his shoulder to elbow, etc.  I used Photoshop, rotated the image on a separate layer, made a second layer on top and placed pixel by pixel over the outline to make it match, as best as possible.  Then, of course, deleting the anti aliased layer so it's not in your way anymore (or doesn't get merged by accident).

I even did one with his head tilting back and him taking a swig from a bottle, I would have uploaded that to show you, but I don't have my computer fully operational at the moment.

It's probably your best way without doing the frame by frame guesswork.

[zabnat]

For pixel art (in Photoshop) I usually just rotate the image using nearest neighbour filter, so I don't get any weird colors on the result and just clean up the messed up pixels until it looks good. Sometimes I also rotate the same image using some other filtering (bicubic usually) to make the heavily antialiased result and use that as a guide in similiar fashion as Ryan Timothy does.

Using vectors could be useful if you use higher resolution and antialias. For lower resolution I wouldn't bother.

[Ryan Timothy B]

But using the vectors makes it easier to know the angle each body part should be on, without guessing angle by angle.  You can rotate it on the fly.
I'll agree repixeling does suck, but it's not a huge time consumer.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I find the distortion associate with pixel rotation usually more trouble and effort than it's worth.  I used to do it all the time, but these days I mostly just redraw whatever it is I want rotated at the newer position (and it looks better).  For vector art  you could try Flash.

[Mouth for war]

thanks for your answers I'll try my best then