Mooktown/luggage: You flatter me! Believe it or not, those are 100% 2D. No 3D involved at all - they were made using vectors. To get the pixels to look right, I also do a lot of tweaking by hand to make sure important lines are on pixels, and not between them. Jesse: It goes both ways! Artists across mediums inspire each other - great music inspires me! I just gotta say it again - thanks!
Dear Amirai, these look great! I'm a pixel artist, and I also create sprites... may I ask which software you used to create this? I can never get such a high framerate as that of your sprites, using Adobe Imageready!
I was curious about that too, Amirai. They look too smooth, with perfect antialiasing to be hand-drawn / pixelled. My guess is you've used some kind of vector based package, and rendered them out tiny size?
Yep. The program isn't as important as the workflow, since they're vectors, as long as it supports actual animation (with keyframes and such). Getting a smooth framerate just takes more frames, which are far quicker to do with vectors than the traditional methods. Like I said, it mainly comes down to the tweaking. There are several vector animation programs out there and you could probably do this type of stuff with any of them. Finding a workflow that works for you is the most important part, because you have to rerender the frames constantly to check the pixels to make sure it looks right.
Yep ... work-flow is very important for us coders too ... Anyways ... really like your work ... will keep an eye on your site.
I personally use Anime Studio. Another option is the tab, but I haven't tried it. Flash might work as well, though I haven't tried that either.
Thanks, there are more on the website that weren't posted in this thread, but I haven't updated the website since posting this thread yet. Still busy working on more sprites Don't let that stop you from asking though!
I don't see what all the fuss is about tbh... Too many frames, not enough weight and pacing, and IMHO not very economic on memory footprints. There's a lot more wrong with these too (I've PM'd you)
I work with each developer for their needs. If someone doesn't want as many frames, I can do that too. For PC games though, it seems to be a non-issue, as they don't actually take up much ram. Your feedback from your pm is valued and appreciated.
Hi, Your sprites are awesome and so inspiring! I'm looking for someone to design and create 2D spaceship and mech sprites. You can view my thread here for more info: Help Wanted Thread
Wow, that's harsh (and this is coming from someone who's critical). Yeah, the weight could be better, but I know *working animators* at publishers/developers that animate worse. As for the footprints, as stated previously, that could be tweaked to suit, I'm sure. For me, I'm going to make a game with few characters, but each of those characters has a truckload of frames, making them each a joy to watch/control, so his "too many frames" would suit me just fine.
It actually wasn't harsh. Without telling too much about our PMs, I would like to say Baccaman had completely valid points, and was not insulting me. Feedback is very important for an animator to improve. Positive feedback is good, but knowing when people are unimpressed have been the times that has made me improve the most. He was respectful in his arguments and opinions. While my animation skills can clearly be improved, it's also a matter of time spent. The better the quality, usually the longer it takes. As my skills improve I'll be able to make better animation quicker, but almost always higher quality animation means more time. Considering how most small teams are working with small budgets, I have to keep that in mind. After reading some of the points about the animations I made, I went back and improved the running animation. That took about an hour. Apologies if you don't have quicktime - animated gifs seem to top out about 30fps, and that animation was supposed to run at 40. It didn't occur to me that it wasn't obvious that the running animation wasn't playing at its top speed.