Collection of sprites

[Gors]

here's a slight edit, WITHOUT adding any frames. It only edits his left arm (as it's easier to edit)



it's still jittery, but the catch is: NATURAL MEANS ELLIPSIS.

"what gors wtf is this shit? What does punctuation have to do with animation gosh darn it"


When we start our first character animation, we're all like "oh man, just draw frames one after the other! it'll work!" And it does, but you might end up getting what we call a "Noob Bounce", which is when the bounce is caused by reusing frames.



for example, this NES Ryu sprite uses the middle frame twice, which causes an unnatural animation, even if it's smooth. Old games used this technique to save up memory space, and it worked at the time. But it's not exactly waht you want here, right?

another example would be a waving hand animation. when we imagine a character waving a hand, we probably imagine this diagram for the frames:



But if you analyze its PATH, you'll see that it's really artificial looking:



a PATH is the imaginary "line" that something moves on - in this case the blue ball that represents the hand position. Since the blue ball cannot move "outside" the PATH, then the result is a really choppy and robotic animation.

If you do this gesture IRL, you will notice that your hand will not follow a perfect arc, but an ellipsis - an elongated and curved circle. (the diagram is kinda confusing, but imagine the 2nd frame being the upper middle hand and the 4th frame being the lower middle hand)



This slight difference between frame 2 and 4 is what gives the naturality of the animation. Sometimes, doing this slight edit will suffice, but to maximize naturality, you can add slowdowns in the in-betweens. Normally, we'll want to spread the in-betweens evenly as shown here:



But instead of doing this, add more in-betweens next to the places the ball changes direction, so NONE of the frames repeat at all:



Then go adding more in-weens, obeying this principle.

The tip is, imagine extremities (such as head, hands, feet) as balls, and put them in an elliptical path. Then, on the peaks, add more in-betweens. This will add an extra "soul" to the animation.