Standing and idle animations?

[thespaceinvader]

The concept is probably OK.

However, the execution makes the biggest basic mistake in animation: only moving the active element.

Basic_Animation_Tutorial

[Unnheulu]

I'm not really sure what he's doing, and just copying and pasting isn't exactly what the project is looking for. Try exaggerating a bit more, and smoothing out the process...

[Jetrel]

I thought I'd have a go at one of these. It's an idea I saw mentioned at the start of the topic, then re-mentioned a few pages back, with no animation as a reply.



How's that?

I think it's not as smooth as it could be, and when he centers his head, it looks a bit wrong. Other people say the fade effect disappears when converted to GIF, so I'm surprised it worked. Can anyone suggest how it could be improved?

By actually animating it, instead of this cheap "select-and-slide" hackery. There's no shortcut to quality.

As TSI noted, you're only moving the active element, and because you're selecting-and-sliding (and flipping bits of the image), you've moved the body into several positions in the animation that aren't quite anatomically possible (such as the twist of the hands.

Don't skimp on movement to make the animation easier. It shows.

The spat loogie in the animation is about the only decently done part.

[King_Elendil]

Hey, I was doodling around when I noticed that the elvish shaman has no idle animation. So I gave it a shot:

I basically hacked the shaman, and just drew the light thing.

Shaman-idle.gif (8.11 KiB) Viewed 5203 times

What do you guys think?

[Darker_Dreams]

first thing that struck me was the standard "only the active element is moving." Then I noticed that when her arms are at their highest reach something happens on our right (her left) where it looks like her skirt deforms. I'm guessing that you were trying for a shadow from her arm that just got too dark.

What you said then was that you just hacked the unit and all you made from scratch was the "light thing." At that point what you're really putting out here is that halo and the animation concept. [acronym=For What It's Worth]FWIW[/acronym], I like those, as a halo the "light thing" would be cool, the animation would be low-resource because it's recycling existing frames, and its different enough from her healing animation that it won't look like she's randomly doing useful stuff.

As a note, from personal experience, its generally easier, cleaner, and less likely to get weird behavior in unexpected places if your animated gifs use replacement rather than cumulation of masking layers. For one thing, you'll need the full pngs at some point so 90% of the work should be done there rather than have to cut away.

Just some thoughts from the peanut gallery.

[Issyl]

His right arm, the one putting the sword in the ground, should definitely move.

I would suggest making his body shift to sit on his back leg.

I would also suggest making his other sword either move up onto his shoulder, or down towards the ground (relaxing his wrist).

[Evelangos]

The top part of the head moves, but the base of the helmet doesn't like the armor was cut, and the top part of it will just slide over the other (the dashes are to keep the helmet representations in their right shape)

-____
- -| -Helmet
- -|
--/ \


-____
- -|
- -| - - - -your animation
--- -- / \

Maybe change the bandana over his head so it looks like the wind is actually blowing in a direction...

About the shaman.... The neck looks like it's stretching, not turning up, and the light isn't there before the item is, like the sight would suggest.

(Not that I'm good at art or anythin, all I've done is about 1 unit)

[Monroid]

Hey, I was doodling around when I noticed that the elvish shaman has no idle animation. So I gave it a shot:

Shaman-idle.gif

What do you guys think?

In my opinion, you could animate that magic beam, the elf looks pretty well animated; and maybe to look more elvish, the magical beam could "explode" and release flowers or leaves... or whatever

[furioso]

Didn't the shaman originally have a little animation where she turned to face the player and winked?

[rhyging5]

hey to every body, what's your opinion about this lighting fx animation for the lich standing?

[Vendanna]

My toughts is that your animation looks terrific! tought I'm not sure if it would be better to have the green lightning as an overlay in a separated place from the actual sprite.

In case that the base frame get's changed (Not sure if they will do it) that your work doesn't get lost or is easier to reimplement on a new base frame.

Between, didn't I tell you yet that your work/style is one of the bests things I have seen by far on those forums? not only graphically but on animation part as well.

[Jetrel]

hey to every body, what's your opinion about this lighting fx animation for the lich standing?

It looks great.

Please post a zip.

1] Post the underlying sprite separate from the overlaid lightning.
2] That looks like you've got only one to three unique "illuminated" versions of the base frame, depending on the lighting direction. That should be all we need.
3] Please make the lightning purple/pink/indigo - that's the canonical color scheme we use for dark magic. All magic from every race follows a certain color scheme.

[Fog]

Wow, thats quite amazing. I can't wait to see this in-game .
IMO, the lich shouldn't be completely still, I woudn't if I had dark magics coursing through my body. You might want to try animating the lich's reaction.

But thats just my opinion, and I'm glad your animation is as great as it is.

[Zerovirus]

That is incredible, though I was surprised that instead of arching towards his staff, the energy dropped back down to the ground. Maybe branch some of the lightning off into the staff? Of course, this is just a small detail and doesn't really matter at all.

[rhyging5]