I’m making a custom class animation for a character that has great significance in my game. How do I make good animations for a guy using Lospec on a chromebook? (Don’t tell me to use a certain post btw)
Ty!
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If you don’t have software that can show a timeline and let you choose frame timings per graphical cel, it’ll be incredibly difficult. But it’s not a strict necessity.
The biggest and best way to learn animations is to study other animations.
Yeti ripped almost all the FE animations here and is the best place to grab them all; I highly recommend studying multiple of them frame-by-frame and just absorbing how they move and how few frames they use for certain actions.
Learn the twelve principles of animation. That’s basically the main thing about animating. Study them and the thing you’re animating “into”, stylistically you need to match.
In vanilla GBAFE, for example, a large number of frames have very “chunky” clusters, or large blocks of a single color get used, that is then interrupted with other colors. These give the sprites a very simple to absorb look, which is vital because of their small size and the need to clearly show their poses.
And one of the things that really makes the vanilla animations feel the way they do is that they specifically don’t have a large number of unique graphical cels, but rely instead on that very same choppiness to showcase speed and or power on their motions.
i summarized the 12 principles in text here, but realized it was pointless:
-Squash and Stretch -- A character's volume is constant, but you can distort it to sell impacts and other motions - for example, going from 20 wide 35 tall to something like 25 wide 28 tall, or to 15 wide and 47 tall.
-Anticipation -- You have to tell us that a motion is going to happen before it happens. You might also call this a wind-up, ie. you rear the weapon back before you swing it forward.
-Staging -- You have to make sure we can see the thing we care about. The battle platforms already do this one for GBAFE, you just have to stay on the right spots of the boxes.
-Cel filling style: Pose to pose versus straight ahead. I can't do this justice in shortform.
-Follow through, overlapping action: When you hit, something you don't barely scuff it, you exert more force and inadvertently trail more deep into your motion than you "need" to.
-Secondary action: When you go forward, your cape trails behind you. It takes a while before the cape catches up to your feet. That cape follows your action, and is moving after you've stopped!
-Slow in, slow out: Things do not move at even speeds. In the case of a jump, they'll move the most in the beginning and then slow down as they gain height.
-Arcs: Humans move in arcs. You have a straight bone attached to a ball joint, so you can't make squares and stuff. The bones and muscles are always going to curve when making natural motions. Every attack should work that way - Even the Knight's bobbles give it a curved motion to the spear's flow.
-Timing: You can do a lot by holding a frame for more or less time in an animation.
-Exaggeration: [Sora swinging his keyblade](https://feuniverse.us/uploads/default/original/3X/4/9/49dd84bbee14b09a806e55a876df5983ae634b8f.jpeg). Nobody moves like this. And that's on purpose. It's oversold. It makes it look like there's more force, more weight to his action. It makes him look funny when we take it out of context, but his legs splaying out make it much more weighted.
-Solid Drawing is about making things look like they have weight and volume.
-Appeal is literally "make it nice to look at", it's literally about making the character have a unique feel - compare the General and the Warrior, both tall but hugely different in feel due to armor and bulk, versus top heaviness and the helmet, etc Contrast as well the Knight, who is very short and bulky and has a shield for armor plate. Because of these unique appeals, they're very visually distinct and recognizable, you can recollect their appearances.
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