Tips for Battle Animations?

[Horatioactive414]

I'm not sure if this question belongs here, so feel free to move it.

Whelp, I'm looking for tips on animating battle sprites. I'm in the process of making one, and I'm somewhat proud of it, so here's what I have so far:

I'm aware of motion blur and whatnot, and I do know how to write scripts, and I'm simply in need of critique and tips.

i just threw all of my frames together into a gif, it's not that fast

[Maritisa]

BwdYeti has some tutorials for this stuff that I dug out of the Spriter's Resource thread for you.

There's two, one from quite some time ago and one that's more recent; both are worth a read.

My own personal critique is that, well... I mean, to start off with, her entire stance seems off. The right arm seems positioned in a very uncomfortable way for holding the axe, and furthermore it's a huge freaking axe. Someone of that stature would almost certainly have to use two hands to wield it, let alone spin it. The spin itself; the first frame, anyway, looks fine. But the rest are very clearly just rotations of the first frame, giving it a strange, square-ish appearance. The GBA sprites usually have at least two or three different parts to the spinning animation.

The leap itself seems like it doesn't have enough force to carry someone anywhere near that high. It also feels rather stiff, there's very little movement of the rest of the body besides the legs. (A common mistake among animators is only animating what's relevant, without regarding how an actual person would move.)

If you look at, for example, the Hero animation, you can clearly see him crouch before the leap, at which point, due to the force of his jump required to make that height, there's a small "shockwave" of dirt around him to reinforce the impact of his kick off the ground. Hector may be a good reference for this animation.

The actual mid-air frames seem fine for part of the animation, but I don't know if I'd jump straight into them. You'd also want to pull the axe much farther back than what you're currently doing, assuming the attack is directly after that moment.

However, I will give credit that most of the composition of the sprite itself seems fine. The sprite itself looks very nice! It's just the way it's positioned and animated that seems wrong.

Edited August 31, 2016 by Ritisa

[Horatioactive414]

BwdYeti has some tutorials for this stuff that I dug out of the Spriter's Resource thread for you.

There's two, one from quite some time ago and one that's more recent; both are worth a read.

My own personal critique is that, well... I mean, to start off with, her entire stance seems off. The right arm seems positioned in a very uncomfortable way for holding the axe, and furthermore it's a huge freaking axe. Someone of that stature would almost certainly have to use two hands to wield it, let alone spin it. The spin itself; the first frame, anyway, looks fine. But the rest are very clearly just rotations of the first frame, giving it a strange, square-ish appearance. The GBA sprites usually have at least two or three different parts to the spinning animation.

The leap itself seems like it doesn't have enough force to carry someone anywhere near that high. It also feels rather stiff, there's very little movement of the rest of the body besides the legs. (A common mistake among animators is only animating what's relevant, without regarding how an actual person would move.)

If you look at, for example, the Hero animation, you can clearly see him crouch before the leap, at which point, due to the force of his jump required to make that height, there's a small "shockwave" of dirt around him to reinforce the impact of his kick off the ground. Hector may be a good reference for this animation.

The actual mid-air frames seem fine for part of the animation, but I don't know if I'd jump straight into them. You'd also want to pull the axe much farther back than what you're currently doing, assuming the attack is directly after that moment.

Thanks for replying so quick... I'll take this into consideration! I'm sorta new to this whole spriting thing, and after looking at spritesheets for a long time, I knew that it was missing something, but I just couldn't put my finger on it. Also, I think the dust from the Hero's jump is actually a separate command and therefore sprite (unlike Hector's, which uses the colors of his skin, according to the palette). I won't stop until I work out every kink, because I plan on using this in my hack. I've been looking for tips everywhere, but to no avail. Again, thank you very much!

[Eliwan]

Try the spriting subforum :V

The hero's critical and return shockwaves are part of the battle animation and are not command codes. :C

As far as specific crit, The blur to jump is far too large for how snappy and existent it is. The majority of the large-distance quick blurs actually tend to also have the character become much less noticible, particularly observable in the swordmaster's animations (and by extension, bwdyeti's astra animation which for the most part follows the same principles).

The arm that doesn't hold the axe probably could stand to move some with the throw, and the legs look funny in the throwing process as well (not just because of animation speed).

[Horatioactive414]

Try the spriting subforum :V

The hero's critical and return shockwaves are part of the battle animation and are not command codes. :C

As far as specific crit, The blur to jump is far too large for how snappy and existent it is. The majority of the large-distance quick blurs actually tend to also have the character become much less noticible, particularly observable in the swordmaster's animations (and by extension, bwdyeti's astra animation which for the most part follows the same principles).

The arm that doesn't hold the axe probably could stand to move some with the throw, and the legs look funny in the throwing process as well (not just because of animation speed).

Oh, I think the large dust cloud command belongs to the Brigand, if I remember correctly. The I don't know which animation uses the small gray one, but I have a feeling it belongs to the Fighter for some reason.

EDIT: I just broke down the Merc animation as well, and it doesn't use it either. The palette is genuine trash as well. I'm literally seeing some of the hair colors on the arms.

Edited August 31, 2016 by Horatioactive414

[Eliwan]

The large kickback-behind-the-user command is used by both the Pirate and the Brigand in their animations. The Fighter on the other hand does not use any graphical codes :V

I'm actually unaware of a small gray cloud? Though I do know that some of the command codes actually change color of their clouds based on the tile that the user is on (for example the pirate/brigand cloud is blue when they're on ocean/sea tiles but brown when on grass/mountain/peak tiles).

[Horatioactive414]

It's not much of a cloud but more of a small shockwave. It's not even that, But I think it represents the movement of air or a surge of power more than that of dust. I recall the command being C30, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also editing the animation as we speak, so yay.

[Eliwan]

C30 is the shockwave used by both brigand and pirate: (the first one is confirmation that it is in fact C30)

Close to that are... mmm..

C31 (which I know the pirate also uses)

C32 (huh, seems like it's a copy..?)

The only other command seems to be C4E...

[Horatioactive414]

Huh. I remember using a command like that.. Or maybe my mind is just messing with me. I did remember it on my first animation, after all...

[Horatioactive414]

Okay, the regular attack is finished:

Yes, I know the return animation is sorta lazy, I'll spoof it up later.

Aaaand here's the static promoted sprite:

Edited September 3, 2016 by Horatioactive414