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[Shambrook]

Ok so I’m working on some sprites for a game, Just the typical running, jumping, ducking platforming stuff at the moment, but I’ve been wanting to go all out with the smoothness of the animation and have been putting some thought into transitional animations. The problem I keep coming up against is, say for example if you run then duck the character does a slide to get under low objects, I want to do a transitional animation from the run to the slide, however it needs to start from a certain frame of the running animation. So say it starts from the frame were his right foot hits the ground, and he goes into the slide, what if the player slides at any of the frames that aren’t the right foot hitting the ground?
You could either hold off the slide till the correct frame is reached but that would throw off timing, or go into the slide anyway which would look jumpy. Or animated like 5 different transitional animations for each of the major poses (Right foot contact, left foot contact, middle, middle up, middle down)

Am I missing a really obvious solution here or am I going to need to do a shit load of transitional animations to get the look I want?

[Jad]

Nah, you just make the transitional frame work generally from all the running frames and play it really fast. Or nah, but that's what I'd do.

[Core Xii]

You could always draw several transitions, one from each frame. Takes more memory, but is as smooth as it can get without going from raster to vector.

[konjak]

Just a tip, if it has fast action elements, don't let the idea of smooth animation get in the way of quick controls.   

And on topic, I'm sure it will look great no matter what foot is where.

[letsap]

One of the philosophies I have is the faster the body is moving physically the less frames you should need. You can still keep it smooth by doing little motion blur things in your sprites, especially in a transition. It all depends on the style you're going for, everything in this thread so far could work.

[ChevyRay]

Just a tip, if it has fast action elements, don't let the idea of smooth animation get in the way of quick controls.

Definitely agree with this.

As long as things happen RIGHT when I press the button, then all is well

Well, I'd say just have the dropping animation, and one frame for each cycle of the running animation that is "between", or basically transitions, that corresponding frame of the running animation into dropping to slide.

You shouldn't really have to do more than that to achieve a smooth look, if you ask me.

[Jad]

^Agreed 100%, as long as general movement around screen is coherent, the brain will probably piece everything together as 'smooth'.

Anyways I'd say try to begin the slide with one or two very quick transitional frames. Be sure that the first transitional can still be read as 'slide', then quickly go down into slide and then you can use some frames to create good release for the action.

Anyways my one tip is: Try implementing a single slide w/transitional frames and work from that. If it works right away then by all means go with it, if you see problems, isolate them, post them here and then go ahead with that.

[Jamie W]

Have you considered using some system where your character is rendered as individual component parts, body, head, feet, hands (6 parts?), and you have some kind of key framing, and transition frames between?

[JLJac]

Have you considered using some system where your character is rendered as individual component parts, body, head, feet, hands (6 parts?), and you have some kind of key framing, and transition frames between?

Paper doll technique gets rid of your problem, but it often looks kind of bad if you ask me. Especially when characters are turning.

If you are using frame by frame animation, it will propably soon become extremely tedious to draw all those in-betweens. When your character has more moves, like 10-15 different animations, it will get overwhelming, because the number of in-betweens would be the number of animations times itself. More transistions than animations, that is.

If your game doesn't have slo-mo effects or runs at an extremely low pace I wouldn't worry about it