Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Dwarves

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Sleepwalker
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

Ah, yeah. Very well zookeeper, you have some good points there... :) Thanks. I addressed the things that was said and here's the new version. I reduced the circling of the spear too as it got to be a bit much once the horse movement was toned down. As TSI suggested I also made the rein hand move a little. All the changes are minor so it shouldn't be much of a hassle for Neoskel to copy...
I Also made the south attack.

Actually, to make work much easier for others to do the horse animations I could post the .psd files too. There the sprite frames are broken up in layers already. I mean, what would be the point to withhold them anyway? to have proof I made them? Well my posts here are proof enough I think. Or what do you say?
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horseman-s-attack.gif
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horseman-se-bob2.gif
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HorsemanSAttackSEBob.rar
(60.15 KiB) Downloaded 487 times
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by thespaceinvader »

The spear definitely needs to come further out in the south attack, or it's going to look like the horse is headbutting the target. The point of the spear should be further toward the bottom of the frame on the strike.

I'd also say that the spear's return just isn't smooth on the south strike. it jitters about a lot.
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Jetrel »

One idea for the bob might be having the horse's head move side-to-side (at the opposite phase of the rider). Not sure if it'd look better, but it'd be relatively easy to try.

Anyways, these are looking quite nice!
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

Hi it's been a long time once again... I have no excuse except that RL for me has had some big changes going on and there will be more to come. It has required most of my attention... Funny how guilt makes it harder to post eh.

Anyway the frame heavy stuff has been finished now - all attacks and gallops. I did make the south spear attack have a little more reach now (2 pixels), but to make it reach even farther would mean stretching the sprite proportions or volume. Something that the other anims doesn't do... Or one would have to change the angle that you view the unit.

If the horses bob head movement is OK I'd rather leave it as it is. I tried doing quick edits to see how it would look moving the head from side to side instead but I didn't like it. Even tried a circle motion but it looked drunk or dizzy lol. If I felt like wasting time I could try some angle change or sub pixel movement on the head, but I'd rather do the other anims first.

*Edit* OK I packed together all the animation PSD's for you. Deleted all unused garbage layers in them and made folders for each frame too so everything is nice and tidy like. Hope it makes adapting them to other horse units easier.
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HorsemanPSD.rar
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horseman-n-attack.gif
horseman-n-attack.gif (11.83 KiB) Viewed 9993 times
horseman-s-attack.gif
horseman-s-attack.gif (12.09 KiB) Viewed 9993 times
horsemanN+SAttack.rar
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Jetrel »

:) Nice.

The lack(?) of a NE bob isn't enough to hold back a commit, IMO - I'll just plop in a still for that for the time being, since AFAICT, nearly everything else is in. As for the bob animations, I wouldn't worry too much. They're easy to experiment with, and at least in my work to clone some of these over to other horse units, I can put them off (loosely, I'm considering killing some free time porting this to the lancer).

Excellent work, as always.
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

thanks :)

2 defend anims coming up. Hmm I'm wondering if the horse should do a paddle motion with its front legs at the top of the staggering... Would be easy to do but increase frames of course so I dunno.

Just one bob and 2 death animations left then. But I am very much doubting that 4 frames for a horse mounted unit could be enough. It would be way too much jerky if the horse should fall on it's side... So I am proposing to increase the frame standard for mounted unit deaths. I'll see what I can limit it to to make it look good.
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Jetrel »

Sleepwalker wrote:2 defend anims coming up. Hmm I'm wondering if the horse should do a paddle motion with its front legs at the top of the staggering... Would be easy to do but increase frames of course so I dunno.
FWIW, though we do want to insist on 2-framers for all human-sized units, I don't have a problem with bending the rules and making a different macro for big creatures.
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

Jetrel wrote:FWIW, though we do want to insist on 2-framers for all human-sized units, I don't have a problem with bending the rules and making a different macro for big creatures.
Ah nvm then, it is probably better with consistency than such minor eye-candy.

Hmm I managed to make a 5-frame death animation... With no bounce. Again the first frame can be for "wounded" and the last is a still corpse. If you really want me to I could reduce to 4 I guess. But it would become very jerky.

I forgot the .psd files for the defend anim. So here they are + the one death.
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horseman-se-die.gif
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HorsemanSEDie.rar
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by beetlenaut »

Shouldn't the rider (or at least his upper body) hit the ground after the horse? Otherwise, the rider has to fall faster, which makes it look odd. It looks like the horse+rider is one, inflexible object.
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

Yeah you are right... Thanks. :) But it it would require an extra frame I think, or shorten the time for the horse to fall. I will see what to do. :?
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by artisticdude »

beetlenaut wrote:Shouldn't the rider (or at least his upper body) hit the ground after the horse?
It looks to me like that already happens in the animation? :hmm: I see the rider's entire body (except maybe his right foot) hitting the ground only in frame 5, whereas the horse's body -with the exception of its head- is fully in contact with the ground in frame 4. IMO the animation is fine as it currently stands, otherwise it'll look like either the horse is made of lead or the rider is wearing anti-grav armor.
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

I kept the old frame count but edited the overall movement a bit... I reckon it's better now. Good enough..? :hmm:
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Jetrel »

Cooking up the WML on this; I'm intending to clone these frames over to the lancer, shortly. I'll post a link to the WML when I have it done. It looks like we have completed the following animations, and I've attached a zip of the latest frames (working backwards from the ones posted in this thread):

Attacks:
- North
- Northeast
- Southeast
- South

Run:
- Northeast
- Southeast

Defend:
- Northeast
- Southeast

Die:
- Northeast
- Southeast

Bob/Stand:
- Northeast
- Southeast
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Jetrel »

I've committed what we have to svn. For the moment, the bob and death animations are commented out or not present.

I'm kinda making an about-face on one of my positions back when we did the saurians; as much as the purist in me would like to just make the "iconic" frame alias to one of the bobbing frames, it's actually better to have a single image for that, because stuff is in motion in the bobbing frames in a way that doesn't always look good for a static frame. I can fix that for the saurians later, but for the horseman at least, it means we're keeping a "horseman.png" file.

The WML is included in the following "spoiler" tags; note that you need to update your "data/core/macros/animation-utils2.cfg" as follows in the second chunk:
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
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Re: Sleepwalker Animation Commissions WIP - Horseman

Post by Sleepwalker »

Hi, I have been gone awhile again, I suppose I might be pretty unreliable with this sort of thing... But things have calmed down in life again so I am ready to spend time on Wesnoth once more...

OK here comes the attempt at finishing the horseman, the NE death and bob animations. They are again a copy of the SE animations from another angle. I reckon they possess the same quality and flaws as the first 2, but another set of eyes might see different :wink:.

I did get a pm from enchilado expressing some concerns about the original death back in july (Maybe he wasn't an art contributor then? Sorry my forum knowledge is dated). I post it here for every ones benefit:
Hi, I was reading your art thread and spotted a couple of ... well, not really problems, but a few things about this animation that (in my opinion) could be improved:

It's nice art - well-drawn and a very smooth animation - but some things look strange to me and I thought I'd let you know.

Firstly, the horse's legs seem to slide out from underneath it while the body stays more or less where it is. I may be wrong about this, but I think the feet would stay in more or less the same place. This would probably throw the body further away (though the knees might bend a little), possibly sending part of the image out of the frame. I'm not quite sure how Wesnoth unit sprites work - could the image be larger, or be placed with an offset?
Yup exactly, I did it just so he wouldn't fall too much off the screen lol. Which I reckon would be worse than having the horses legs slide a bit... As for being placed with an offset it would do the same thing as I have already done. To fix both problems an entirely new death animation would have to be made where the horse falls differently, though I'm not sure if there is a satisfactory one that would be natural.
Secondly, when you're animating a motion, having one frame which reverses this action can look pretty bad. The horse's head is travelling in a curve, at the same time turning from vertical to horizontal. In the second last frame, however, the head actually turns past horizontal - the mouth becoming higher than the top of the head - before turning back the other way again. I can imagine that this would happen if the top of the head hit the ground first, but it doesn't. Because the other objects in the animation move smoothly throughout, this looks a bit out of place.
But the top does hit the ground first, it is just between the frames :P . As for this detail of the animation looking bad, well, I just disagree, I think it adds to the whole. Though if more people think the same I guess I will have to change it.
Lastly, the pink saddle/saddlecloth - in the last frame, a dark line appears through it - this looks fine on its own, but the line can't be seen on the previous frame without zooming in - indeed, I thought there wasn't one until I did so. The line jumps down two pixels, and when looking at the animation it seems to appear from nowhere. Moving the line in the previous frame down by a pixel might fix that.
The saddle changes angle as the horses torso portion does. The line you see is the outline of the crest of the front of the saddle. Maybe you didn't notice but the torso also moves down about 2 pixels at the last frame and the front of the saddle just follows with... Really I don't see the issue here, though as like the rest, if more people see an issue I will try to make it more clear.

I wonder if another frame or two might be best...

I have some initial frames in the psd's that is like a baseframe for NE facing Jetrel. Though I am skeptical about the hanging of the spear flag (is it called a flag?). Not sure if its position is ideal.
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horseman-ne-bob.psd
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horseman-ne-die.psd
(143.68 KiB) Downloaded 445 times
horseman-ne-die.gif
horseman-ne-die.gif (7.25 KiB) Viewed 8514 times
horseman-ne-bob.gif
horseman-ne-bob.gif (7.58 KiB) Viewed 8514 times
HorsemanNEBobDie.rar
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