The VG Resource

will do, thanks, I'll have a look around, do you happen to know any good tutorials?
Judging by the animations on this tutorial http://maniacco.tripod.com/tutorials.htm when the character kicks off the ground, his body pulls back and by extension his head raises,
which begs the question, was the horizontal movement of the legs enough or too much? if I alter the raising and lowering of the torso and the pelvis is still swaying at an abnormal rate, it'll still look like a crummy animation.
On the subject of arms, I figured I'd have to redo them, I didn't put enough turn in the body to swing the arms up fluidly anyway.

I don't know what you were aiming for because of your animation. Give this site a check. It explains many key points on animating walk cycles and gives you animated examples of said movements.

A walk is a more natural, slow type of movement, so the gap between legs doesn't need to be so wide.

okay so I've looked around and fiddled around, sadly not made much progress though,

animated:


I tried moving the body but trying so in a number of ways it either looked like a flappy torso or a jerky motion.
I've got 2 things left to try,
1) see how the current cycle looks with properly animated arms (preferable as I don't have to redo the legs)
2) start the whole cycle from scratch, I'd rather not, but I'd rather start over than fiddle with a broken base.

animated:


Okay I think I may need to restart the animation from scratch, it'd be nice to know if this is at least better or worse than my other attempts?
Thanks in advanced

If you want my opinion, it's too slow. It doesn't look like he's in a hurry, but like he's trying to run underwater. Cut down the number of frames and speed it up.

Thanks for that, I removed 2 frames and sped up the frames by 10ms per frame, the animation is looking a lot more run like.
I think if I flesh the character onto the wire it'll look like a nice run animations, worst case scenario I may have to lean his head forwards a bit more,
if anyone else sees any problems please let me know and again thanks for all the help, I haven't had much experience animating before and anything I can learn is of great use


EDIT: and I may need to altar the bobbing a little bit, it seems to go up down up down in the course of one leg movement.

it seems you did overlook a vital point in a running cycle.

i think it should be evident by making a quick comparision between your mockup and the sprite i just posted.

okay I'm starting the animation from scratch semi-following the run cycle tut on the spriting dictionary page. once I've got run cycles down I'll be working on some mock up tiles (I recently found a tile format that pretty much fits every occasion with tiny space usage and I'd like to experiment with it)

animated:


The new try at the run animation.
Following the run cycle tut from the spriting dictionary page.

EDIT: I'm fairly happy with it, though I will probably change the arms at the end of their swing not to hold to the body, its making the run look unbalanced.

Apparently Meta's example did not get the message. If you look, the character's body twists with his running. You can see his chest at one point and his back at the other. The way to do this is to give a bigger gap where your shoulders move each time. In your animation they are fixated at one point, so to create the illusion that the body turns, you move the shoulders back or forward.

ah right, thanks!
Meta, for future reference, a picture may be worth 1000 words, but sometimes its simpler just to say 6 words "swing the shoulders with the arms" XD
I'll fix that up now and maybe flesh the character onto the animation tomorrow, one of my friends is helping me continue on an older project, so I have another sprite sheet needs working on.
EDIT:

animated:


didn't think it would make much difference on the skelle so I never thought to sway the shoulders, makes quite a difference though however sloppy I may have done so. it'll probably show better when lighting shows it.
Anyway I may be more active in another topic for my other project (1 topic mashed with randomly styled sprites would be messy and confusing)

Now you have two problems:

Firstly, you've made one side of his body twist, but not the other. His far shoulder moves fine, but the one closest to us still remains fixed, it should move opposite to the other one.

Secondly, what are his arms doing? Try running. I can guarantee, you do not stretch your arm out straight in front of you when you do. So why does he? Look again at Metas example. The arm movement is mostly in the shoulder, and the elbow contributes very little. Always remember that the human body is not a free-flowing thing, but consists of joints, and these joint move in different ways for different actions.

I mentioned I was going to fix the arms, their meant to be hugging close to the body, but it simply doesn't work for this type of running, so I will be changing it to more of a swing.
As for the other shoulder, it will show when the skelle is fleshed in the colour and shading, atm its hard to show depth with no shading. And in case your wondering the reason the back isn't showing but the chest is , is the sprite is facing fairly towards the viewer so the characters face can be shown.

That wasn't what I was saying.

For one thing, hugging the arms close to your body DOES work for this kind of running, you just didn't animate it well. You're treating the animation as existing in 2D space as a cardboard cut-out. That is not the way you should animate. Notice that the forearm in Metas example shortens during the animation, to simulate it bending away from the player. The reason yours looks wrong is because you've tried to replicate that by simply sticking it out in front. That's not how it works.

As for the shoulder, it's not to do with colour and shading. The fact is, your character's chest as it currently stands is stretching due to the fact that you have moved one shoulder and not the other. You don't have to show your character's back during the animation. You can quite easily get away with only a little bit of twisting, but you've put a lot into one shoulder, and none at all into the other. Try doing that yourself. Move one shoulder back while keeping the other one completely still. Now tell me that's a natural thing to do while running.

Honestly, the best way to animate a human is to act out the poses yourself, and pay very close attention to the position of all your joints.

(03-14-2012, 09:33 AM)Bombshell93 Wrote: [ -> ]Meta, for future reference, a picture may be worth 1000 words, but sometimes its simpler just to say 6 words "swing the shoulders with the arms"

your own conclusions after a solid analysis is worth one millon words worth of simple explanations. if you cant figure it out on your own, you're not analyzing your own work, thus you dont really see a problem on them unless someone else tells you you have to.

basically, you are unable to honestly criticize yourself and your own work for the sake of improvement and or development. you do it purely because you are suposed to.

not to mention you are unable to take a reference and study it properly.