Cloud's animations

[Cloud]

I'll try that out tomorrow then Jet.

Thanks for the praise, Wesnoth's a great game and it's a pleasure to help in anyway I can .

[Girgistian]

You do pixel art now? Better continue doing those baseframes before you don't need me anymore.

I'll second Jetrel's praise, too. It's to see people doing some of the more... tedious tasks while our main contributors are working on their own stuff andwhile I'm trying to conjure up excuses for not working on my stuff.

[Jetrel]

I'll second Jetrel's praise, too. It's to see people doing some of the more... tedious tasks while our main contributors are working on their own stuff andwhile I'm trying to conjure up excuses for not working on my stuff.

Yeah, what's so cool is this is the magic benefit of open-source.

Not everyone has the skillset of, say, neoriceisgood, but quite a few people have some skill. En masse, with a little guidance on what to do, and a little bit of effort in C&Cing it, a community can get a pretty incredible amount of work done.

+ they get some education and tips in the process
+ they work on something where their work actually gets put to good use. It's not sitting on some dinky DA account that only a few thousand people see, it's in a game that millions of people play.

(for comparison, even neoriceisgood's DA gallery has only 100,000 pageviews in its entire lifetime, and he's wickedly good. We get about 250,000 pageviews every month.)

[Cloud]

Changed the cloak on frame 2, frame 3 is night impossible to give that effect, but I've tried to have it poking out the knife side a little - i.e. just hinting that it's there.

Thanks Grig, and I totally agree with the comments. I'm already looking at what else I might be able to do whilst I've caught the bug (certainly the Lord's and Steelclad's hammer attack (I've got thoughts of cloning Karrag's hammer smunch for the Lord's at least) could use some work, maybe even the Guardsman (and begining to actually create animations rather than clone them) depending on how that goes).

Anyway for now I've got to go and do some work, but I'll try and get a blocking for the D'gaurd done by the end of the day.

[thespaceinvader]

Please, don't clone Karrag's attack - A good two-handed attack would be great, but Karrag's is not such. It's missing two frames, and aimed slightly incorrectly. Copying the Pathfinder or Explorer's motion would be a better choice.

T'guard is looking a lot better - I'd be almost inclined to say that you could even take it further, though - the more you raise the cape, the faster and harder the attack will look. Be confident in your ability to exaggerate things - you have to take it a long way before it will look wrong.

I'll run this by Jet again when I see him, but I think this is probably good to go. Very nice work, and thans for your sterling assistance =)

[Cloud]

Okay on the hammer front, I'll shop around a little and see what I can come up with, once the D'guard is done of course.

I'll have a quick go at raising that cape then start in earnest on the D'guard.

You do pixel art now? Better continue doing those baseframes before you don't need me anymore.

Not likely to happen, there's a big difference between cloning an animation and creating something from scratch!

Edit: Changes to the cloak made, it's up around 3px at the unattached end, I don't want to go overboard with it. I also had a quick fiddle with the shading on the inside of it that I wasn't too happy about.

[Cloud]

Attempt at the D'guard attack ani, the first frame cloak needs a little more work I think.

Just noticed the swish is a little off, will correct that too.

[thespaceinvader]

Looking good, keep up the good work.

[Cloud]

Defense frames done, just the changes I mentioned earlier to go.

Actually looking at it the cloak in the first attack frame doesn't look so bad, I'll wait for Jet's or similar's opinion on it before making any changes (so I'll just rework the slash blur for now)

dragonguard-blade.gif (6.45 KiB) Viewed 2640 times

dragonguard-blade-slowmo.gif (6.47 KiB) Viewed 2640 times

Edit: Never one to make it easy on myself I've started blocking a new hammer animation for the Dwarvish Fighter. I'm basing it heavily on TSI's explorer animation as suggested, and am trying to get the impression the shield is strapped onto his back. (That detail will probably be more prominant with shading).

fighter-hammer.png (1.57 KiB) Viewed 2592 times

Anyways, everyone's welcome to fire in their first impressions, it is very definite WIP, but one that I hope has an end to it .

[Jetrel]

Try this for a frame 3 & 4 on the thunderguard.

I'm not -quite- sure how it'll look myself, but it should probably be decent at least.

[Cloud]

It's nearly there, the 2nd frame needs a tiny bit more work now for a smoother transition. I'll get that done later today and do something similar for the D'guard.

(Grr why does seeing it on the forum make it look different from previewing the animation in GIMP? The transition doesn't look so bad now somehow )

[thespaceinvader]

I'd suggest that you make the cloak wider on the first striking frame - it quite prominently seems to expand during the recovery and defence, where it goes over his shoulder and hand, whilst in that frame it seems to only be about half to 3/4 the width of his shoulders.

Otherwise, this is about ready to go. I applaud your dedication here, cloaks and free-floating fabric are very difficult to get right.

It probably looks different on the web because your browser doesn't render colours in quite the same way as the GIMP.

[Cloud]

Widened (and slight shortened - it just seemed a little too long for me personally) I tried to hint at the small hood this guy has.

I have a feeling it's just a slight difference in speed between GIMP's playback feature and the real save that makes it feel different.

I'll get rid of the background of the two newest frames and zip it up.

Edit: background removed and zipped.

[thespaceinvader]

I think you've got it.

And GIMP has a playback feature? Why don't I know about this? Or is it in 2.6? If so, I'm resisting 2.6, having tried it once and seriously disliked the changes to freehand select.

[Cloud]

I'm using 2.4.6 (like you I disliked 2.6 so downgraded)

Filters > Animation > Playback

It's pretty basic; play/pause, advance one frame, go back one frame, stop and a speed control, but it does the job.

Zip file added to the last post if you missed it