Blog Week 2: Attack Animation
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Recently I’ve been working on the boss’s attack animation, this proved to have quite a few challenges. But first it might be better to give a brief explanation why the appearance of the boss has changed slightly compared to the one on last week’s post. It was pointed out that the styles clashed when comparing the sprites next to each other, this needed to be fixed so some time was lost when doing that as I had to remake the sprite sheet from before, luckily I had written up every frame of the animation and how it moved so reanimating this wasn’t though.
Animation smears are when you set out key frames and make a few smeared out frames in the middle, focusing more on capturing the motion rather than all of the individual details. I decided to use this method due to the limitations with pixel art, because every frame and every pixel really matters and it will be noticeable if it looks weird. With animation smears at least I’d get a bit more leeway. Unfortunately you can’t rotate pixels due to the fact that most software’s will try to resample the image again causing the image to lose quality and usually blur, this was worked around by setting the interpolarization on ”nearest neighbour” when using the transformation tool. The results will have jitters and most of the time you can’t use it as it was, but it served well as a base so that you could draw over it and fill in the missing pieces. As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t have a lot of space left in the canvas, this caused some minor issues as I had to slim down a few smears in order to fit. I decided to do this after I had pretty much finished the animation it wasn’t a big deal and it worked out better that way otherwise I would’ve been subconsciously wary of the edges making the animation lackluster. So all it caused was minor time setback (Circa an hour) but in the end it was easy to work around. One minor detail that was tried out in order to make the animation more dynamic was to make the head turn when lifting the right arm (left from our perspective), while it sounds like a simple task, as I mentioned beforehand rotating and skewing animation in pixel art is not as simple as it might seem. The head worked out fine with no bigger cleanups but when turning the jaw which had a lot of straight lines it looked cut off so we decided that only the head moving would work out just as well we liked the effect it gave as well so there was no big loss there. The sprite did cause some issues, but they were nothing that couldn’t be dealt with.
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