I've been playing with versions of his guy for a while now. This picture uses a web safe pallet. Which changed his color some, but it's close to my mm2 version.
My idea is a kid who recieved his spooky powers by touching the Bogie Man. I call him Kid Fritz. Named after a Godly chess program.
Looks cool so far, though i couldn't help but notice that his arms don't actually swing from the front to back - the foreground arm just swings from the front to his side and the background arm swings from his side to behind and back again.
Yup the arms, I missed that. Guess thats why their aren't a lot of 6 frame walks found on Pixel Joint.
I had an idea for the shadows. I was tring to under state them to draw the eye more to the bighter face. My thought was that shadows become less emphized in low light.
I'll take all the comments to heart. I think one day I might be able to do something cool with kid fritz. So far I just keep drawing him younger and younger.
I've consider adding more frames, but I think my basic cycle probably needs to be prefected more. Useing tween frames for smoothness, is kind of like cheating to me. They are most commonly added in for things like secondary movements. Paced a split second slower than the main movement. Things like flowing hair and stuff like that.
I do see the jump, now that you pointed it out. Seems like you have a good eye for spotting things like that.
A tween frame is more a fundamental of animation than a cheat, but no worries. Ideally you should sort out the jump, as it is now that gap kills the animation (imo).
The arm moving out of place does kill it. I'm reworking the whole animation right now. I thought it be easy to animate because I've been drawing cartoons for years. But it's harder than I thought it be.
I like my animation to have more interest to them like my still has. Right now it just looks to plain looking.
The new animation will use tween frame. I am starting to see how they impove animations.
I like the last version a lot more also. Although, if you ask me, his left arm should be as dark as or darker then his left leg. The reasoning is that it's the furthest limb in the background. Well, that's just how I'd do it anyways. Keep it up!
Good point. It's hard to really know about the color. Because the last gif wasn't done with web safe colors. But on my computer the pants look dark red and the shirt is brown. But on my brothers computer the whole pic is washed out.
but I should probably try some better colors. Right now I'm painting up a backdrop for him. Games really are more the environment than the sprite.
here is a update to my walk cycle. It includes him activating his powers. His powers are like the green lanterns. He can change them into many things. The only probable is I haven't thought any more weapon transfromations for him.
I think the animation is very good, however, I feel the sprite itself to be quite jagged in the outline. Are you using a solid black outline, a very dark hue of a color, or some anti-aliasing?
I draw and paint with my tablet at 400 px in photoshop elements 4. I resize to about half. than I definge. after that I select the whole layer and use stroke mask to outline it. The stroke mask isn't set to anti-aliasing but could be.
If I was to anti-alias how do I keep white spots out of my edges. Which is why I definge the anti-aliasing in the frist place.
You do it by hand pixel by pixel, frame by frame, softening the outline.
The first step is to clean up the outlines, a clear concept of that shows in the following tutorial (part two); http://www.derekyu.com/?page_id=221
After that you can use a dark grey hue to replace certain pixels in the outline where it fits, like ninety degree corners and stuff. It really cleans up the picture!
EDIT:
I used a frame from the animation and "cleaned" it up in two steps.
The top one is the original.
In the second one I have cleaned up a few rough edges and scrap pixels, plus tried to smooth out the outline with one single shade of dark red/brownish.
In the bottom one I made a few minor adjustments and tried to smooth things out a bit more.
Well, personally I don't use pitch black outlines that much except for VERY dark bits. So my only real suggestion would be to try and have the outline in a dark shade of a color that fits the character.
I made the black parts of the outline from my clean-up dark red, and the lighter shade of the outline in a brown/red tone.
Personally I think it smoothens the character out, have a look!
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Edited by Pan-tosser
