Two Much Animating

[2WB]

I’m not going to even try past that pun, take art. I’m hoping to upload a laundry list of WIP gifs so that people can check back on this or whatever?????

Basically seeing process of people is something that I really live for and I’ve been trying to let people see my own for a while.

Tayhine Lustruv - Arcarius, Demoiselle

As one does with any horse edit, take horse and isolate horse. Leave in sword ranger for funny times.

Then, to horse, append rider.

Have a little fun because oh my god this is such a good horsie you gotta give it some petting.

Continue laughing at horizflipped sword ranger. Test how elastic you want the bow to be after firing, as well as see how good Jugdral animation was. It would be sooo cool. But no. Of course not.

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Lestra - Keeper

(This mug with many edits by Aeorys, Hoshihearts, Elise; I’m not good with mugs don’t mistakenly think that I am)


(This animation was helped along by BwdYeti giving me a sketch – I couldn’t figure out how to position her completely correctly since she wields Light and Elder magicks.)

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Eliwan - Lord, Erudite

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Lydiiav - Heiress, Freeblade, Wanderer

So, Heiress. The first animation I ever made that I stayed proud of.

Look at how bad it is. I had to fix the problems here, but I just still like the animation. It works.
There were lots of little idosyncracies here that I needed to fix – First of all, I needed to make the palette better. Lyd’s dress is supposed to be a smooth gradient from green to white to purple, and I didn’t even have a true purple. Maybe I had learned enough tricks in the intervening years to smooth it out; was my hope.

…Yes, I never put the dress on those last few frames. I’ll probably do that right after I make this post, now that it’s fresh in my mind and low-effort.

Oh, and there’s this thing. I’m not talking about it.

Going to awkwardly past this one in here – It’s my model ref for her colours across various weapons/outfits. My idea with this one is that, since she’s a lord, she can have her own custom palette for each of her animations; and thus not have to be worried about fitting all her animations into the same 16 colors – so I can afford to make each of her Prf weapons have an on-model appearance.

Which, because I am a nerd who cares about this, I will be.

Fencer by LordOfGabrielKnight. I just drew over half of it and spliced other ideas into a personalized critical. (Which is funny because Fencer itself was an animation splice between many different classes)

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Wirym, Shapeshifter

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Tayhine Laostrier, Nymphomaniac

You’re not allowed to question her class name, why she dodges by jumping, or what was going through my brain with that heartpulse critical windup.

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256 tile animation
This is a contest that me and @Tsushi / @Tsushima constantly kept iterating through. The premise is rather basic – just make a full battle animation using only 256 graphic tiles (one sheet). Of course, this is exceptionally difficult, but there are a large number of tricks that would be possible if one could manually place animation tiles down the way that intsys’s system enabled. (For example, the Cavalier and Fighter put their weapons down on top of other graphics, thus making “layers”.)

256t - Caster

256t - Spear
This one, actually, was really embarassingly awful. Just… pathetic animation. I almost want to not upload it.

Like, so bad. This barely qualifies as content.
It’s also like 264 tiles or something, not 256.

Tsushi then actually made me a map sprite for this class – and it was really cool.

So I thought that I should probably just change gears, and make a cool animation instead of trying to squeeze it in – and then I realized “I should change the whole thing not just part of it”, so thus my Sentinel was started –

(Yes this is as far as this one’s gotten.)

256t - Axe

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Mage Bandit (Generically positioned to be able to look right with both Anima and Elder magicks; Black Mage refined most of my keyframes and helped me splice together better inbetweens here)

Illusionist (Elder-wielding Thief)

And the finished one –

These were for reference and fun respectively – since the same-ish process happened for the girl, right down to needing to tell people they’re adorable.

Hussar (Sword Mounted Expert, Knight Lord edit - I didn’t save any WIPS of this one but since everything but the crit is just a straight redraw I think nothing was lost)

Militia (t0 archer)
This is old like four years old

But it’s still the same?

Astra (Light-Sword Pegasus)

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A mug that is actually mine that isn’t a total embarassment to the fact that I’ve been making FE sprites for a decade.

I have so many weapon icons to post that, uhhhh

This is a tutorial in the sense that it walks step by step through how I draw weapon icons.
I don’t actually put the things on that divided background, but I keep it mentally in mind so it’s pretty much the same?

There’s someone to blame for all of these and only one of those persons is me.

I could and should crop the icons away from their text but I have literally been typin this post for over an hour already so I just don’t feel like this.

Type icons at the top are primarily drawn by Black Mage (Horse, Armor, Wing; as well as style help with Terror/Monster, Book/Mage, and the crown.)
Affinities at the bottom are the 22 Major Arcana and are drawn by @SEVA.
And hey, text font this time – speaking of text…

I gotta be space-efficient and make very very narrow things, right?
And practie my cursive a little I guess? Something like that.

But hey, super ultra tiny font… Where else could one take advantage of something like that?

Why, these UI panes, of course. So I started seeking out nice ways to fill them up and this is my best attempt so far and I’m not actually that big of a fan of it.

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Starheart’s five lords all in a single unified place and color. I had tons of fun making these and all sorts of variants on it –

Nonstandard sprites are just enjoyable at a point because I don’t have to concern myself with any particular precident and can just do…whatever.

[Agro]

yoooo I love them, your animation sketches are so much fun to watch! Especially shirtless axe dude.

[Vesly]

Holy mother of pearl. This is a lot of great work! Nice job.

[SilverManedWolf]

Amazing work as usual, good job!

[vilk]

That is a lot of animating. And more importantly, a lot of cool animation. It’s neat seeing the in-progress stuff, too!

[Zoisite]

@2WB

These were for reference and fun respectively – since the same-ish process happened for the girl, right down to needing to tell people they’re adorable.

@Runa Mad facts

[Klokinator]

Really high quality stuff. Good to see how you’ve improved over these last couple years.

Illusionist is definitely my favorite.

[Memestaralbert]

This is a insane amount of work wow keep it up!

[NeroZonbolt]

This is so beautiful, i knew this was going to happen :'3

[Huichelaar]

This stuff is drop-dead gorgeous!

[CookieMaster]

And I thought I was being unique when I thought of making a winged hussar…

[2WB]

Oh, yeah, I have a thread, I should post in it.

Unfortunately, life’s been undergreat so I haven’t gotten as far as I wanted with anything.

Lichtenberg strikes rather viciously;

and Resire pays multiple simultaneous homages.

This is just an experiment, about how few graphical cels I can get away with but still have fluidity by using clever positioning and overlapping tricks; and not something I particcularly envision actually completing unfortunately.

Of course, some inconsequential progress on stuff got made, like for example:

These were intended for use with the Wight animation that I was working on originally with Tera, though he gets things actually done where I futz with them for an extra eternity leading to them not getting done any time close to when they ought to have been (However, as I am still fiddling with elements of the Wight to make it match my pleasures, perhaps it is not too late. I may make a post featuring it later?)

And then there’s just a lot of map sprites to consider in general; because I’m way too ambitious and want to never cut things out that I want to have.

Which includes making some updates too all sorts of things and thus I unfortunately mostly repost this; but it’s got new stuff on it too?

And here’s why I had too make sure those were absolutely perfect – I had to make sure all my crazy UI dreams could stay intact with whatever nonsense that I ended up with.

“But you don’t release anything anymore,” naggling voice

Okay but what if I did:

Pegasus Rider Repalette (Swords, Spears)

“But there’s already a Pegasus Knight repalette”, you might say. Not wrong, but the repalettes I found had features I found undesireable and fixable.

This one features no shared colors; but unfortunate “blobbiness”:

Wings (4) // Mane, Hooves (2)
Blade, Armor, Gloves, Saddle (3) // Hilt, Hair (2)
Skin (2) // Outline (1) // Spare (1)

In some ideal world I’d have the patience to redraw more to reduce the wings to 3 colors, and use that and the spare color to separate something out of the Spearhead-Armor-Gloves-Barding category because it’s really overused; but I’ve already held onto this for too long.

One of the reasons for that is because I made a bad decision and played a lot of Crystal Clear this year. It’s absolutely incredible how much got packed in there.

And I am stupid.

So stupid that instead of getting some nice sleep to prepare myself for my birthday, I’m making this post.

[Klokinator]

@2WB

And then there’s just a lot of map sprites to consider in general; because I’m way too ambitious and want to never cut things out that I want to have.

These are all really cool. Great work!

[Silver-Star]

That’s a big collection of Sprite Animation you got there. Can’t wait to see more of your work in the future and how much you improved.

[LordGlenn]

@2WB

In some ideal world I’d have the patience to redraw more to reduce the wings to 3 colors, and use that and the spare color to separate something out of the Spearhead-Armor-Gloves-Barding category because it’s really overused; but I’ve already held onto this for too long.

I love this repalette, but I do have a couple of thoughts on this?

Given that the 4th body/wing shade is used primarily for depth (for the legs and wing further in the background), I feel like keeping 4 would work better than trying to reduce it to 3 and make both planes of depth still work as nice? Not to say that it couldn’t be done, but I think it does help with the readability of the sprite by having it set up the way that it is.

For the color separation angle though, perhaps having an alternate version that has the cloth use the hair shades (and using the currently spare shade to give the hair 3 colors in both versions) would give people the alternative of breaking the colors up a little more or sticking with this version and keeping the cloth and armor the same color? On some of the sample palettes, it really pops to have both the cloth and armor colors match (Row 1, Column 2 for example), but in other cases, it might be useful to have it separated? Also would open up having three usable shades for the cloth instead of just two as a possibility…

[2WB]

The main reason why I rag on the 4th shade of the Pegasus in this instance is because the colour is unused on some cels, used on only a few pixels in others, or used without a real presence of third shade nearby – making it not actually add that depth. For example:

Despite being replaced with a rather obnoxious orange, a fair few of these cels have survived in states I would call more than merely fine.

Going for outline colour gives back depth on the cels where it was taken, but is clearly darker than many of those frames were designed to accept.

And using the third shade removes a little too much depth from a few frames, but overall leaves the sprite quite presentable.

So just some combination of that; which I started here but I don’t want to spend too long on this;

Is what I was thinking at first.

However, you’re right – since there’s a colour open I should pull something into two ramps of two colours or expand the hair depth – I didn’t want to redraw the hair frames because I feel that two coloured hair is the correct option when colours are limited. The mane colors going unused in the rider is also a bit of a missed opportunity (though an intentional one)…

[LordGlenn]

The only reason I suggest adding the spare shade for the hair is in part because one was there originally, just one that was shared elsewhere in the palette and looked terrible with darker hair colors when unchanged and caused problems elsewhere if it was changed. But, adding just enough of a hint of a third shade makes the amount of hair visible (especially with the Peg Knight having longer hair overall as well as a good-sized mass visible in the idle frame) feel not as flat and means you don’t have to contrast so much between shades to make it feel like it has some depth.

Not completely a problem, but having a smaller ramp across 3 shades might be useful so that you don’t get a stark clash when the character has very light or very dark colors in their portrait and you need to make the palette work and stand out. It’s one of the reasons why I really like how you did the ramp for the armor/sword on this, since the old dress/armor was very limiting just for that same reason because of the white on the breastplate, giving you only two colors to work with and having to make them both work with the rest of the sprite and not be too stark of a contrast against the white.

Also, while I was fiddling with the repalette this morning, I felt like the cloth covering on the face could use a tweak to its shading/lighting since it felt a little “square” and flat - would you mind if I posted that to see if it would be worthwhile feedback to incorporate?

[2WB]

Yeah, you’re absolutely right – I’ll definitely return to make another pass … eventually?

Yeah, I agree with that. I focused on something that works well for me without thinking hard about the way other palettes would work; which actually bit me when it came to the demo palettes – They feel almost cluttered color-wise due to everything being so heavily shared on the rider.

Of course I wouldn’t mind! I reshaded it the way I did since it used to be flat so I left it flat; which was definitely not the ideal solution to use.

[Pikmin1211]

I like the overall look of the stat screens though the more intricate patterns might be a bit disruptive. I think the number display being blue on blue/purple isn’t helping in that regard. Very cool skeleton lad map sprites btw

[LordGlenn]

Here was how I tweaked things as I fiddled with them - one screen capture is my own palette for a character that I was intending to use this animation for and the other is the same edits applied to one of the demo palettes (R1C2, because I really like that Vanessa-esque palette):

In addition to the cloth and adding a third shade for the hair (also applied some to the sword’s hilt), I also changed 2 pixels with the outline of the mount’s head to help with the shape of the cloth on it. Probably not the best version of alterations that could be made as battle animations aren’t completely my forte, but hopefully they’ll be of use when you do eventually decide to do another pass. :]