I'm staying in LA until the end of February. If something happens this month, I'll probably try to make it there.

Well at this point I just want something that works well for making these silhouette mockups, I'm going to be drawing the actual frames by hand, scanning 'em, and coloring them in photoshop, ideally with a final result similar to the concept piece in the first post. I'll give that software a quick try sometime here and see how it works for that process.

Hahaaaaa, photoshop cs2, which probably isn't helping. Any suggestions for something good to use, preferably freeware? I had imagined this part of the process as being a faster thumbnail-sketchier kind of thing and wasn't prepared for the amount of time it seems to be taking, so anything that could make it a little more painless would be very useful indeed.

Yeah, I'm staying at my brother's place and forgot until a few days ago that I'd actually lent him a copy of The Animator's Survival Guide years ago and forgotten about it (as well as most of the content in it). Having reread most of the way through it now, I would certainly have approached this differently if I had it all to do again... which I actually do, basically, since I'll need an entirely different run cycle for the second chapter of the game. Well, not entirely different since I can probably reuse some of the motions, but yeah.

The almost certainly final version. Now I just have to actually, uh, draw the frames... and color them.

Okay but shouldn't they go up and down regardless? Do you just mean x-coordinate-wise?
Edit: And here's what it looks like after that and a number of other tweaks:

And... now it might be finished? I'll probably sleep on it, give anyone who spots any problems that need fixing a chance to speak up, and if it still looks good to me tomorrow I'll print out some worksheets based off of it and start drawing the frames. Thanks for your help, everyone!

I made a tree.

Well, just got another hour of work in after a truly lousy day. I think I'm getting close now! I'm seeing some jerkiness on the sickle's tip at one point and think the left arm could use a bit more detail... and of course I still need to get the clothing and hair-type details in. Thoughts?

Ah, good point. I still think this silhouette approach was overall a good idea, but my does it invite oversights like that!

Yeah, I'm sort of going back and forth between trying to make it smoother and trying to make it more accurate, since they one I work on one it often damages the other

Anyway. A friend of mine pointed out a HUGE mistake, and I just spent several hours rectifying it as best as I could. I think some people were trying to point this out but I didn't understand what they meant, but the shoulders weren't syncing up properly with the left/right steps. This problem became apparent once I colored in each limb to make its position distinct.

So here's where it's at right now. A bunch of the stuff that I had kind of smooth has gotten jerky again and will need to be resmoothed, and a lot of components of this need to be tweened, but the shoulders are at least approximately where they need to be. I'll just have to chalk the several hours of unusable work up to experience and soldier on.


Also, I just noticed there was a sub-forum specifically for posts like this... whoops? I'm usually pretty good about things like that. Oh well, if a mod comes across this they can feel free to move it as is appropriate.

The dot idea was really useful letsap, though the most useful thing was actually a slight variant on your advice where I put spots of color over where I thought each shoulder was and then tweaked the arm animation based on that. I also moved the head to remove its jerky motion, and based off of that and the ground line I relocated some of the frames. I think it looks quite a bit better now, though maybe still not quite ready to go. Closer, though!

edit: noticing the left arm looks pretty garbage though. That's the next thing to fix then.
edit: Another small update

Left arm's still a bit jerky. Once again, big thanks for the tip letsap, I've been applying it to each piece that looks jerky and it's letting me make a tremendous amount of progress in smoothing this stuff out. 

Oh, right. Yeah, I'm planning on drawing different run cycles for the left and right run: another reason I started in silhouette, since that looks the same regardless.

Yes, I entirely agree with you regarding doing things traditionally first being the best way, and given an endless supply of time drawing a bunch of traditional run cycles would probably be an excellent way to prepare for this.

That all sounds good, though I'm worried I may end up having to redo a lot of it. Still, better to get it done right, since this and variants on it are gonna be basically what the player looks at for the entire game. I'll see what I can do next time I work on it, probably tomorrow afternoon.

What do you mean by bringing stuff closer to the center, btw?

[am]

if everything is supposed to look unnatural and improperly proportioned/animated then why u even ask us

duh

Primarily for practical reasons and thoughts about how to make it look smoother. It's supposed to look naturally unnatural: I'm not going for Silent Hill shakeyhead, I'm going for a distinctly inhuman figure that still moves with a certain kind of damaged grace.

More importantly, though, I'm worried about how well it will work in practice. Starting the animation, stopping it at an arbitrary point during the cycle, using it on slopes, and making variations on it based on game state are particular points of concern, as I've mentioned in earlier posts in this thread.

wont you have an Oro situation with the damaged arm? dont let that stop you though, never stopped capcom!

Um, you'll have to be more specific, I don't get the reference.

Edit: Oh I should also say that even though I keep saying that some of the things you guys are addressing are semi-intentional, that doesn't mean I'm not listening. For instance, I changed the timing up to make the animation seem a little bit more grounded in versions 3 and 4 after thinking about Eigen's feedback. So I am listening, I just wanted you guys to have context for giving such feedback. Sorry if I seemed dismissive.

On the most recent version? I've been trying to address that. I mean, part of that is that the limbs are supposed to be sort of weirdly-proportioned in the first place, so when combining that with the position of the shoulder and elbow now showing up in silhouette looks a bit strange it's hard to tell whether that's good-strange or bad-strange.

Regarding the left arm, have you ever met someone who due to nervous or neurological damage has trouble controlling their arm? It tends to kind of curl up as the contracting muscles and tendons take over. I was imagining something kind of like that for the left arm.

Looking forward, I'm wondering about a couple more potential problems. First, how well would something like this animate running up or down a slope? Should I be trying to animate the top half and bottom half of her body separately? Second, as implied by the concept piece in the first post, the left arm doesn't stay useless for the entire game. Should I be animating THAT separately?

I'll probably try to export these frames and test the animation in-game tomorrow, which hopefully will give me insight into at least the former of the two questions.

     
ROGAINE KERMIT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOWTIES.

That may be, but I mostly just want to get it to look good enough that I can move onto the next phase here. I kind of wish I had started with a vector animation tool, though I do do some redrawing here to imply a change in the position of the hand and arm with the sickle: certainly the legs are conducive to vector animation, but the legs are also the part I'm having the easiest time look smooth. I spent a bit of time on it today, and I think it's looking a little better but there's still some jerkiness issues in the torso and right arm (sickle arm).

Ver. 1:


Ver 2:


Ver 3:


I may play with doubling up the frames so I can have the left arm rock forward instead of back on the second step, but right now it looks like she's trying to hold it still at her side which also kind of works.

Right. The thing is, and this is what makes this exceptionally tricky to me as a beginning animator, I don't want it to look natural, I want it to look kind of off-beat and other-worldly. As someone correctly pointed out on IRC, when people run they touch down heel-first and roll onto the foot, whereas in this cycle I have her touching down on the ball of the foot and never really landing on her heel at all.

Ideally, I want to evoke graceful but damaged here.

[did]

Technically a lie, since I actually did a very low res one for a LD48 game a couple of years ago. Anyway, I'm trying to develop a run cycle for a 2d platformer (SO ARTY, SO INDIE), and could use some opinions since I'm pretty new to this.

First, a bit of background. This is the character:


This animation is for the first section of the game, where she doesn't have the wings and can't really use her left arm. The idea behind the process here is to do it in silhouette so that I only have to do half the cycle, then probably print out each frame and use it as reference to hand draw a final frame in the style of the above image. I also didn't include the hair or the clothing because it would just confuse the issue, and it shouldn't be too difficult to add them later. However, I did include the sickle, since I think the weight of it is important.

Anyway, here's what I've got so far:

I'm concerned with how jerky it is right now. It has 11 frames, which is basically like having 22 since it's both halves of the run cycle, but it doesn't look very smooth at all. I'm also concerned about how well it will work in-game, since she spends a lot of time off the ground which might make transitioning to idle and back look wonky...?

Constructive feedback is very much appreciated. I'm honestly kind of overwhelmed by anxiety working with animation for basically the first time, since good animation is something I care a lot about but have no real experience with. Thanks!