The Mana World Forums

What. the hell.

Guys - the first animation in this thread is by far, the best, and it's not terribly good because it's way too short and the body is too stiff. This wacky, gimped-out lunge that you guys have been pushing back and forth sucks. It's just bizarre motion. Scrap it.*

Don't try and draw these animations in their "final form". Start with a stick figure and get the motion right before you actually start spriting the details. Every time you've done this, you've done some way-too-short little animation, impatiently decided that "oh that's good enough let's start spriting", and then spent hours making an animation based on a bad foundation.

Especially at your level(s) of skill you can't possibly expect to do these right the first try. You should be mocking up somewhere around a dozen stick figure animations before you attempt to actually sprite a real one.


If you're wondering, you should shoot for about 4-6 frames for a sword swing. 2 frames simply will not do to convey the motion.



* Don't argue that people have spent a lot of time and effort on it. It still sucks, and if you want something good, it has to be discarded. For someone competent, that's a trivial, disposable amount of work. If that's something you consider herculean, you need to practice, practice, practice until you can spit out that kind of work in an afternoon's time. It's just like programming - in order to be quick enough to get competent work done, certain operations, like say implementing quicksort (or whatever we choose as an example) should eventually get to the point where they're second nature, and it's not a crippling ordeal to do them. To get a significant amount of content done for TMW, you'll need *somebody* on the team who is at that level.

I'm sorry but I have to agree with Jetryl on this one. The swing motion should be kept simple. Everyone's going for the natural look. I think we should look at it from a cartoon perspective where a lot of things looks more natural than in real life. Plus, the more simple the movement, the more easier it would be to dress up and maybe less lag on the rendering on clients. Some, including me, don't really see most of the other players' animations anyway. They just walk jittery warping to and fro with monsters dying along their path.

mon wrote:Plus, the more simple the movement, the more easier it would be to dress up and maybe less lag on the rendering on clients. Some, including me, don't really see most of the other players' animations anyway. They just walk jittery warping to and fro with monsters dying along their path.

That sounds more like client lag than rendering complexity.

mon wrote:I'm sorry but I have to agree with Jetryl on this one. The swing motion should be kept simple. Everyone's going for the natural look. I think we should look at it from a cartoon perspective where a lot of things looks more natural than in real life. Plus, the more simple the movement, the more easier it would be to dress up and maybe less lag on the rendering on clients. Some, including me, don't really see most of the other players' animations anyway. They just walk jittery warping to and fro with monsters dying along their path.

Actually, going for the natural look is fine, the problem that swing2 and swing3 animations are not natural looking at all. The first animation despite looking rigid do indeed looks more natural. Let's start with stick people drawing as suggested. Here's my idea:

Hey Valus, maybe you could proceed with the original animation you made. Maybe slant the swing a tad more so it would have a greater horizontal area. Then do the other views. They fit the game imo.

Valus, don´t give up ! Continue with your work, it´s good. Only work better in colors of the char and make the sheet.

This is a very important step for this project, a brand new weapons is only waiting for this ...

Continue !

Thanks.