Making sprite animations more fluid...

[miyabi95_]

I have a general spriting question...How would I add more fluidity to the way a character animates? The way Sonic looks in this ROM hack explains what I'm curious about:

Spoiler

Now, I know the straightforward and simple answer to my question is to just do it. Spend hours and hours drawing it all out by hand, right?

I'm wondering if there are any...Not shortcuts, per say, but just a slightly more efficient way to add fluidity to sprite animations. The software I use are Manga Studio (actually pretty helpful with drawing sprites, to be honest) and Photoshop. I'd appreciate any suggestions. c:

[DarkGrievous7145]

Sounds like you've answered it yourself.

For spritework, the only things I can think of to speed it up is using sprites made of pieces, and animating in something like flash that supports keyframing, and perhaps skeletal animation. However, this is only super-practical for sprites that are somewhat more high-definition, since rotating a tiny little group of pixels usually looks pretty bad.

I do recall seeing various video tuts long ago about keyframe animation, in particular, and you do have to take into account for things like physics, at least, as to how it might work IRL. Some of these principals definitely apply to animation across the board. Don't necessarily think in terms of how many frames, but also their timings. I'm going from memory, but one of the videos I saw talked about making a swinging pendulum. The timings of the frames, and/or the distance the pendulum travels between each frame should gradually fluctuate. In pixel art, this probably could be done by doing something like:


Ironically, this is something about animation that terrifies me, and that i actually am terrible at, creating animation is easy, creating fluid animation requires considering how the anatomy of a character actually moves or changes shape, or how physics may apply to a certain object's speed or shape.