Drawing Sprites and animating them

Hello there

I searched a bit around the internet and could not find any good tutorials that explained how to draw and animate a sprite
(though there are tutorials on how to draw a sprite in a single pose; and animation is only covered if you already have a sprite sheet)

What I'd like to know is: If you draw a sprite, are there any techniques that help you visualize the different actions? (running, walking, slashing and so on) or do those sprite artists only work with their imagination?

Are there any programmes that help you with the different animations? (Poser for spriting would be quite handy :), or any other program to can set the pose of an example puppet)

Thanks a lot for your help!

Actually Poser adds a lot of extra work to animating. You wouldn't believe how tricky it is to animate a 3d character nicely until you've tried :P
The benefit is not as big as you might think, unless you make an iso-prerendered game or somesuch where you can't draw yourself anymore.

For animating, I usually draw a skeleton from lines (stickman), which I animate. When that is done, I draw the sprites over it. Works for me + platform games. Other game types might require a different approach.

So if you draw a character who walks, did you look up how other artist made the movement look like some quality animation?

If so, I think I have a lot of work to do. I tried once drawing a sprite with the help of a sprite sheet, but my character always looked kind of wabbly (because I could not get it exactly the same way on every picture)

What I did is look at stock videos of people moving (free running was kinda inspiring). But there are also guides on how to draw a walk / run cycle for cartoons and such.
Once you're done you might have to tweak individual frames until it looks really smooth. You might even have too many frames and that's why it looks wobbly.

You can't have a single sprite and turn it into an animation, in 2D anyways.

What I'd do is draw a stickfigure (like Random suggested) and use that as bones and then draw from there.
OR you could split your character up in many different body parts and then rotate/scale them in runtime in MMF2. I did that for a game and it turned out great.

@ random: thanks for the help. Well than, I'll have to watch some walking videos or tutorials before getting it right :)

@mechbowser: that scaling and rotating sounds interesting! How do you do it?

Ahhh, the wonderful world of creating animated sprites! It is quite tricky. There probably only so much people can tell you over a forum. A lot of practice and trying different techniques is best!

Here is a website I found years ago that can help! Look through chapters 7 - 11

http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/tsugumo/

Creating sprites can also be referred to as "Pixel art" so try searching for "pixel art tutorials" or similiar on google.

So you say your wobbly sprites are because you can't draw the same picture alike twice. Try and copy and paste the sections you need from other frames to get rid of this.

Also, if you use graphics software with layers that can help, like photoshop or Gimp (which is free). Then you can create multiple frames on different layers and change the transparency so you can see the underlying layers.

Drawing stick figures is probably the best way to animate fluidly. One problem I had though was the proportions. Try drawing your character first and then working out where the bones should be positioned.

The scaling and rotating is also a great idea. You can overlay those on top of the bones you animate. This is probably the easiest way to get a good result. Try segmenting your character into different parts (arm, leg, head etc) and having them on a seperate image. Then copy and past the seperate body parts over the top of the skeleton. MMF has a rotate ability built in. Move and resize the different parts to cover the skeleton.

There are other ways to animate. You might even want to hand-draw the animations and scan them in. This is probably one of the most difficult and time consuming methods. But if you're a good artist it'd get the best results!

Hope I've been some help!

Thanks a lot for your help, fungalgrowth! If Layers simplfy the process, I should probably use paint.net more often..

Well, than there´s no easy way of doing animation :crazy:

I never tried hand drawn/scanned animation. I´ll give it a shot, though I am not that good an artist.

Thanks!

Hehe, no problems at all! I like being able to help people out. But I'm more of an arteest than a programmer!

You can try hand drawn, but I believe it really will be too difficult and time consuming for most people, including me. And I've done 2D animation before! You'd probably only want to go this method if you want large sprites. If your sprites are 32x32 or 64x64 you'd have to be crazy to hand-draw everything. You could also just hand-draw your character if your better with a pencil than a mouse, and do the animation on the computer.

Really, the best way to achieve good results in a reasonable time is using the stick figure method. I just found some software called "Pivot" that will allow you to animate a stickman. This should make animating a snap. Then you just need to paste your characters body parts over the top! Heres some youtube vids

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pivot+stickman+tutorial&searc h_type=&aq=f

Anyway, have a look, and give us a yell if you get any good results or need any more help!