Standing and idle animations?

[Zerovirus]

Cut and slide spear is not impressive at all. Perhaps try and make the outlines less jaggedy, and conceal the cut-and-slide nature of it by changing minor wood details?

[Mica]

It might just be me, but it looks like the shoulders are going up a frame or two faster than he 'breathes'.

[Atz]

Cut and slide spear is not impressive at all. Perhaps try and make the outlines less jaggedy, and conceal the cut-and-slide nature of it by changing minor wood details?

It's actually not a straight cut and slide - I've altered in a few places, and I have actually already tried both things you've suggested.

Unfortunately, I ended up discarding most of my alterations because they didn't really do much. Attempts at altering the wood details failed; the spear in the base frame is so dark that I couldn't find a way to make the alterations stand out without just making the spear look weird or totally changing the colour/lighting. I'm having trouble de-jagging the outline for similar reasons. I admit I'm not so good an anti-aliasing, but because all the colours involved are very dark, I'm not sure how you could avoid a stark transition. Unless you go to semi-transparent pixels, but I didn't think that was allowed?

Just for comparison, the attached image has whole swathes of the black outline replaced with colours from the shaft for the frames when he is inhaling. But, on my monitor at least, it's barely noticeable and the whole thing is still really jagged. I agree that it's not ideal but I'm not sure where I can go from here.

It might just be me, but it looks like the shoulders are going up a frame or two faster than he 'breathes'.

They go up on frame earlier, then go out (sideways) one pixel when his chest goes up, then down one frame earlier, then in. This is deliberate; if the entire torso goes up and down at the same time, it looks wonky. Like it's flashing between two different poses rather than actually moving (which is unsurprising since that is what it would actually be doing).

[thespaceinvader]

You can use semi-transparent anti-aliasing when it's necessary, it's simply best to avoid using it too much, and you can't use semi-transparent TC over anything but transparency.

The shoulders still looks odd. I suspect that it's because they seem to pull the rest of the body up, and follow it down. The chest should lead, and the shoulders follow, I think. When I breathe I don't lead with my shoulders...

Other than those two minor issues, I think that you're good to go.

[Reepurr]

If you change the way a spear's pointing so that it has the classic right 3, up one (or whatever) lining, then it effectively gets longer.
So you need to shorten the spear, so that it doesn't get 20cm longer when he breathes.
And also, the bottom of the spear doesn't actually move, so it looks like he's bending the shaft.

[Cloud]

My advice would be to think how the shading would change as he moves - the shield is going to cast a different shadow, if he's breathing in and out (which is the look I'm assuming you're going for) then think about how the light might subtle change on the breastplate.

Not to big myself up:


A lot of that is cut and slide, mainly because it doesn't need much re-shading after every movement. Cut and slide isn't necessarily a bad thing, just use it intelligently.

Also the spear gave me some troubles - You'll note that I started with it slightly angled towards the camera. This allowed me to avoid the problems you've got with the spear at the moment. On the subject of the spear: don't forget that the head is going to move the furthest, right not it doesn't look like it moves far enough.

The other thing I've cleverly done (somehow: I'll admit it was unintentionally) is draw attention away from the majority of the moving parts by animating the face.

[thespaceinvader]

Cloud, that looks good to go to me. Nice work.

[Cloud]

I think you already committed it didn't you? (The frames should be in the anims topic, but I might have forgotten to include them).

[thespaceinvader]

Erm. I don't remember having done so. It's not in SVN. I'll add it tomorrow if you send me the PNGs.

[Neoskel]

I think that might be better if he closes his eyes every other bob instead of every bob, but i'm not sure how much more trouble that would be to put in. Would that just be too many frames?

[thespaceinvader]

I could probably manage that. I'll see how it goes tomorrow afternoon. Busy in the morning annoyingly. Night.

[Atz]

You can use semi-transparent anti-aliasing when it's necessary, it's simply best to avoid using it too much, and you can't use semi-transparent TC over anything but transparency.

Oh, awesome. That should make things much easier. I do need to do some RL stuff now, but I'll try to address the spear problem and the other things people have raised soon.


EDIT: New version. I think it was actually the top part of the spear which was making it look the most stupid because it didn't move in quite the right place. Also the hand didn't move sideways when it would need to to hold the shaft properly (see also: stupid mistakes which I should have noticed earlier). I've also added some anti-aliasing, adjusted it so the chest lifts before the shoulders, and made it pause on the base frame a little longer. Hopefully this is now all fixed, though I am still a little concerned about the spear.

I haven't changed the lighting on the breastplate. It's not really rotating, and to my eye, it looks like it's got all layers and ridges which dictate the lighting. I'm not sure just moving up and down a little would change that. I did mess around with it a bit but never got anything that looked even close to decent; it just looked like the shape of the breastplate is changing.

[shiremct]

An initial blocking attempt for a merman javelineer standing animation. Two versions, one with shaded base and one with blocked base frame. The blocked base frame looks quite jumpy at it's transition back to base, but to be honest, my initial blocking of the base frame was rather shody so keep that in mind.

Javalineer_Standing_Animation.gif (4.13 KiB) Viewed 4984 times

Javalineer_Standing_Animation2.gif (4.41 KiB) Viewed 4984 times

Two things to note:
1.) I tried to emphasis the non-human elements of the physiology here just a bit and go with the chest and stomach swelling straight out more-so than normal like a fish's stomach. I tried to keep it subtle enough to work with a human torso, but (hopefully) different enough that standing side-by-side with a human, it would look just a little different. I know the merman portraits have a very standard human torso, but the actual sprites look... much less human.

2.) Saurian standing animations are 6 frames... don't know if there are any guidelines that have been established somewhere in these 61 pages, but I was shooting for matching that. I currently have 5 and would use the 6th to smooth the breath-down transition better assuming it wouldn't be better used in some other manner, though i've had trouble with that 6th frame so far due to the complexity of the sprite and my crappy base-blocking. The blocking is rather rough but shading will smooth out some of the roughness, I hope. I know his left arm looks wonky blocked, for example, but I'm pretty sure that motion will work smoothly once i shade it.


Comments on the motion and timing would be much appreciated. I was going for just a very minor tilt to the spear, but perhaps it's not enough? Also, I may have misinterpreted what I blocked out to be the opposite little fin near his tail... I couldn't tell if it was the opposite fin sticking out to the side or meant to be like a dorsal fin running along the spine... Looked like it could have been either from the base frame, but I went with the side-fin.

[thespaceinvader]

His hand sliding up and down on his spear haft looks wrong. Just don't move that hand, unless you want to tip the spear back and forth. There are no real guidelines about how many frames to use - as many as are needed.

Atz: I don't know how I managed to miss that one. Pngs please.

[Atz]

Atz: I don't know how I managed to miss that one. Pngs please.

It's probably because I edited it in instead of double-posting.

Anyway, here are the PNGs. Base frame not included; 1 is the first of the new frames. Timing I used was 400ms for base, 150ms for 1 and 2, 300ms on 3, and then 100ms for the last three.