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For easy 3D to block things out roughly, check out SketchUp. It has an evaluation version you should be able to use.

Man, this was so tricky, adding the motion of pushing the jacket aside to clear the gun.. Alon, I use Adobe Photoshop for the drawing, and Adobe ImageReady for the animation. It's a bloody hassle most of the time, though, but I suppose I just need to learn how to work it properly..

But anyways. What I had to do was the following: I had to record myself pushing a jacket aside, and then pull out a gun. Then I had to match that footage up with what I already had, which meant scaling it, since it wasn't the same size.. Trying to squeeze that animation in at the beginning took 3 hours, which is the time it took to complete all of the WIP01..



As you can see he now actually moves the jacket aside before pulling the gun out. I added a little sway to the jacket as an end touch, to take the edge out of the harsh ending. Still not satisfied with it, though, so maybe I'll do some tweaking on it. Some colour flickering going on, on his right thigh, something that should also be corrected..

Stefano, I'll see what I can do to explain the process when I wake up Saturday. Been up 33.5 hours now, and I just can't keep up mich longer..

I had to look long and hard before I saw something that didn't make sense, aside from aforementioned things. It's overall a very good piece of work, and I especially like the pattern on the side of the building which is at an angle. I've tried similar things before, and always gave up, so that's very impressive to me.

The thing that I did find, though, was down at the edge of the sidewalk. I marked it out inside that big, scary red circle. It rounds a bit strangely, and I don't know if it's supposed to be that way..

I understand where you're coming from. Realistically the recoil should probably affect her more than it does now. I made some modifications to try and make it look better, but I don't think it worked out very well..

All the constructive criticism in my post with the 'hooker' firing a gun was very inspiring, so I started working on an animation of the main character, Jac, unholstering his gun. First I tried ad libbing it, as with the 'hooker', but the result was horrible, so I gave up after two hours.

Then I realised I could do some old fashioned motion-capture using my webcam, and since I just bought a nice USB 2.0 one that can handle 30 fps, I decided to have a go using this technique.

So after recording the short clip of me unholstering a Glock 17, I saved it as JPEGs. I got 57 frames, so I decided to cut down on that to make creating the sprites more manageable, and ended up with a nice 12 frames.

So after roughly 10 minutes I had made 4 rough frames (as many as I had made by hand before), and realised this is definitely the way to go when animating quasi-human motion.

Here's the result I've got so far (now presented without watermark):



The problems I have so far, that I know of, are as follows.

• Shape of the bottom of the jacket changes too much on frame 2.
• He pulls his weapon through the jacket. Supposed to move the jacket aside first to clear it. I didn't motion capture it as this, but I will record myself doing this, and fix it.
• The last frame has a bit too much of a skipping feel to it, it needs to be more fluid.
• I should probably add a little motion to the lower legs, even though there was none in my motion capture.
• Again.. I just realised that the animation really ends too abruptly.

[So in conclusion..]

Now, this was a lot of response, so I'll see what I can do to react to it all..

In order of appeareance:

The gun tilting down at the end looks weird to me (like it goes limp) [...]

Was going for a bit more relaxed hand-pose, unless you mean the metal of the gun itself seems to go limp?

That gun looks pretty heavy. I think she'd have trouble aiming with a single hand.

Yeah, I did animate it so that the gun should look heavy, but I don't think it's so heavy that she gets too much trouble aiming. Also, does take a moment to stabilise it before firing, though.

IMO her belly is a tiny bit too staight in the standing frame and I think the swaying of the hair is slightly too much.

You are quite right about that, and it's something I was supposed to fix before animating her, but since I got carried away I never got around. Not too late, though

But I think it would be cool to see the "pod" of the bullet being explused from the gun and leave it smoking in the floor for 3 or 4 frames

It would be a really cool effect. I had it planned to be that way at first, a case ejecting, but then figured I'd be lazy and make it caseless-ammunition -- which naturally doesn't fit well with the rest of the story, so I'm just going to scrap that idea and add a case being ejected..

I'm not sure what kind of gun she's holding but it doesn't look like a six shooter.  If that's the case there should be some action on the gun.

It's supposed to be a futuristic gun of some sort of make and model, but you are right, it's not a revolver. I really like the one you made, and I'll see if I can make something similar, myself.

The gun is just a placeholder, though. The very few times I've made 2D animation I've always tried to get the general motion of it down first, before adding details to 'separate' objects like, for instance, guns.

You should also make her 'lady bumps' bounce a little when she fires the gun.

Hehe, yeah, the girlfriend pointed this out as well..

It might have had a bit more impact if she'd actually put her other hand up and looked away as she fired the gun but that's too late to change now and unnessercery...

This is the second 2D-animation I've made (first one being the walkcycle for the main character), so while the idea of her supporting the gun with a second hand, and turning her head away as the shot goes off, would fit perfectly, it was just feeling a bit too daunting at the time to consider

Now that I've been playing around with it some more it doesn't seem all that scary, and I might revisit it and do it something like that. Or just use the idea for another character

I think that right shoe looks a bit weird, you could fix this extra pixel there.

The pixel sticking out from her heel, right? Yep, I'll get rid of that one.

Firearms usually apply recoil pressure to shoulder. You could try to make shoulder move back more. Not sure about light handguns though.

Yeah, I have a feeling light handguns might work differently. While the kickback you can see in the animation suggest a seriously powerful recoil, it really shouldn't be, seeing how that's a small caliber firearm. I think I'll just settle with the the recoil being absorbed by the bending and upward motion of the arm, as well as perhaps imagining her shoulder moves back a bit behind her hair

Also, the copyright stuff is pretty useless, because no-one actually steals anyone's images here, and you could have more edits and paintovers if you'd remove the copyright crap.

Agreed, it's pretty redundant and it does make paintovers slightly more difficult. Will stay away from it in the future

She's not dressed like a hooker! Maybe as a sassy girl, but I would't dare to ask "Hey, babe! How much?".

I think perhaps you have more experience with hookers than i have.. .. but seriously speaking, I'm trying to stay away a bit from the stereotypes. Granted, I'll be using quite a few since it does add a bit of a nice flavour, but.. all right, perhaps I'm just trying to excuse myself here, hehe..

and seriously, you do not need the copyright symbol. thats ridiculous.

Definitely, won't have to see those in the future

honestly a hooker would have weak girly arms and holding it with 1 hand, the gun would kick back quite a bit going around 100 fps...

Oh, I don't know.. Guns are tricky things. We're lead to believe by Hollywood that handguns are portable Big Berthas that will knock a guy out of his socks when firing them, and send badguys flying out through windows.. Again, I'm no expert in hookers, but her profession aside I think I'll let her be a strong little woman who can handle the recoil nicely.

in this pic, the kick appears to be EXTREMELY delayed which makes the animation look very odd to me.  I think you should condence all of the kick into ****1*** frame.

The delay was a delibarate choice, to give it a little overshot (I can probably not use that term in this instance, but I'll do it anyway). It's not something that bugs me too much, and is in fact the way I prefer it to be. But still, thanks for the input

The only problem I have that nobody else seems to have mentioned is that her left arm is too short. The general rule is if you're standing up straight, your elbow is at your waist and your fingertips are at your mid-thigh. For her stance, lower the elbow a tiny bit and make her forearm longer and she'll look more in proportion.

I did initially make her anatomically correct, the way you described it, but it just didn't look good. But that's just me not very comfortable with this kind of low-res graphics just yet, and particularly when there's 'organics' involved I get trouble, especially at joints..


So in conclusion..

Thanks for a lot of great feedback. I will take it to heart, and while I've decided to just make a couple of smaller tweaks (and add a real gun) I won't work too much on this particular animation as I need to move on to actually make some progress; but I've got a lot of things to keep in mind that will definitely help me out. So thank you

Thanks Well.. just added some facial expressions to the one above.

Noticed the shading along her left leg is a big rough, so I need to smoothen that out.. as well as after I've slept, hehe..

.. but before that..

Removing frames 10, 12, and 13? *tries* Ooh, yeah that's exactly what it needed:



Thanks a lot, Colossal

Here's what I came up with after about an hour and a half worth of tweaking, and I think it looks a bit better.. got some hair swaying now, and the body reacting a bit more to the recoil.



With the amount of time I put down on this animation, I think I need to write this into my game somewhere

First of all, nevermind the hooker, it's not supposed to be a hooker firing the gun, but I started out just playing around with her (maybe that sounds a bit wrong) and soon I had her firing a gun..

Second, the speed of the animation was a lot better in Adobe ImageReady. In Firefox/IE it slowed down quite a bit, so just.. imagine that it's faster

Anyways, I'll get to the point. I look at the animation, and I think something is missing, but I can't exactly put my finger on what it is. Could it be that she's firing a gun, but the recoil is hardly noticable? Maybe I should make her flinch a bit, closing her eyes as the gun goes off..

I've been staring myself blind at this thing the past hour while working on it, so I could really use some input..



(Oh, and sorry about the big © - we live in dangerous times and I'm paranoid )

Kyraal: I will take your advice and put some object under his arm, actually his arm is not leaning on anything but is supposed to be bracing himself for another blow, but not every one knows that, or I may just add a shadow underneath them, for if a draw his arm leaning on the ground that'd make it anatomically incorrect.       

Yeah, good point on the anatomically-incorrect suggestion. The main problem I had while looking at it was that unless he leaned on something to support his upper body, he'd tip over due to the weight of the helmet, chain coif, and the shield (and possibly a heavy chain shirt underneath his tunic)

Is there something in the background the fallen knight should be leaning on? As it is now, it feels like he's holding himself up on thin air.

He could still be falling backwards, though.

Blue - Roughly the line of the ground.
Red - Some kind of object to support his arm on.
Green - Roughly where I think it might be a more logical place for his arm.

What do you think? I'm not really certain of what I'm saying, myself

All I can think of off the top of my head is the tie knot. It looks a bit strange the way it is now. I mean, even if you loosen the tie, the knot usually stays the same (at least that's how my ties behave ).

I've made a quickie to show you what I think it should look like:



Haven't worn a tie in a year now, so I could remember wrongly. Other than that, I can't see any problems. It's looking good. As far as his age goes, there aren't any set rules (that I know of) stating you need to be of any certain age to be a CEO, so I wouldn't worry too much about that