Descent Into Darkness Campaign: Ghast Revision

[thespaceinvader]

Like i said earlier, there really is no rush.

Relax =)

[beetlenaut]

I agree with TSI that the teeth get too big. It's mainly in the last frame where they seem to be doubling in size in an instant. It's too much for it to be the perspective. I love this concept though, and look forward to seeing it in the game! I may have to replay DID...

[Stern]

Tell me what you think of the new teeth. Using the coloration from the original ghast frame, I shaded all images in the same way.
The next thing I am going to work on are the muscle masses. I am going to need a lot of critique to get them right. I will work on those frame by frame and post the results as I get them done. As thespaceinvader said, we have plenty of time.

[lostnumber]

I still wonder if the mouths grow a little more in size then would be necessary. I know you are supposed to exaggerate in sprite art, but they appear to almost quadruple in size. It also appears that the left foot grows significantly in size as he steps down, moreso then could be explained by him stepping a little closer.

But I'm not really an artist, so thats just my layperson opinion

[Jetrel]

Actually, one thing I'm seeing in this is that some body parts are, what they describe in animation, as "off-arc". This is kind of a new concept I've finally clued into enough to describe in words, rather than just understanding intuitively. I should probably add this to the animation "dos/don'ts" tutorial, although I'll have to contrive some more normal example of "doing it wrong", since this ghast is so inhuman it'd confuse people.

All motions of any real-world body part will follow a smooth "path", generally in the shape of an arc. With this, though.. you've got certain body parts that stutter to the left and/or right of the "path", which makes the thing shake-around in the frame a bit.

For one example, it's noticeable with that mouth on (from our viewpoint) the upper-left side of his head. In the frame before the biggest-opening of the mouth, it suddenly juts a bit off-arc to the left. But this is actually a problem with several parts on the body.


This should probably be the very first thing you fix - do it before detailing muscle masses.

[Stern]

Thats a really interesting concept! I decided to draw some "tracers" on the Ghast's frames so that the movement of the central head, hands, and foot could be tracked. I see some immediate discrepancies in the "natural arc" that you mentioned. I will devise a method to get the various body parts to travel in a parabola throughout the frames so that they move smoothly to the target. I think that this can be done by drawing parabolic lines between the key frames, and then manually tweening all of the consecutive frames together along the parabolic lines.

ghastanimation.gif (12.53 KiB) Viewed 5017 times

*Edit*

I drew some parabolic lines to see how well the ghast matches up, and I came to some interesting conclusions.

ghastArcAnalysis.gif (13.02 KiB) Viewed 4846 times

From the base frame to the 2nd frame, the Ghast is lurching towards the lower right hand corner. Then immediately in the 3rd frame, the ghast turns 45 degrees towards the bottom of the frame. The frames then get confused as parts of the ghasts body attack the bottom of the frame while other parts of it attack the bottom right corner. This discrepancy in the Ghast's overall direction creates a great deal of confusion when compared to a natural arc as highlighted by Jetrel.

[Stern]

I decided to take the Ghast back a few steps and redo some of the blocking for the animation. Right now I am working on getting the ghast to attack only the bottom right corner. Here is a rough draft of the new animation. As I make the movement less jerky and get everything finely tuned, I think I will have solved the "out of arc" problem. Has this helped the kinematics overall?

[Jetrel]

With the arms and such, definitely.

It's hard to tell with the rest of the body, because of how it flickers back and forth between the different colors.

It might help to have the blocked version stay in those "bright colors", even to the point of making a paintover of the base frame in that. When it flickers back and forth between the bright color and the regular, it makes it quite hard to visually read.

[Stern]

Heres the Ghast with just bright colors. It looks like something funny is going on with his toes on the rear foot.

[A-Red]

It looks like something funny is going on with his toes on the rear foot.

Yes, it does. Specifically, the light green toe is staying stationary while the dark green one turns about 90 degrees. The rest of the motion looks great to me.

[Stern]

Made adjustments to the foot. Removed recovery frame. Can you see anything else that I can improve?

[JustinOperable]

It's definitely better in this proportion but I kinda miss how the whole mouth seemed to scrape the ground, almost like it was gulping up a poor sap, but being an artist myself I would not suggest you make such a serious change considering how good it already is.

[Stern]

Recolored the ghast. Added attack "whoosh!" effect and teeth. Do you see any way to improve the kinematics of these animations?

[boru]

This is going to be an awesome sprite eventually .. but I have a few comments, peanutty as they might be.

In the previous version (top of this page), the arms were doing a kind of bearhug, to hold his prey while all four mouths bit. Now, I'm not sure what the arms are doing.

And because the motion blur covers over two of the four mouths, that horrifying moment of attack might get lost.

[homunculus]

the previous version seemed to turn the belly to the side while stepping forward, rather than leaning back so much that it seems to be struggling to keep balance.
this is why, compared to the previous version, the latest version seems to lack strength in the bite.

also, why is the lipstick so pale?