Hello! I am making my first game by code, and am wondering if anyone is kind enough to edit my simple character sprite and add maybe better walking animation. It doesn't have to be special or anything, I'm just not good at art and visuals, again if you do decide to help Thank you very much!!!

I'm just not good at art and visuals

I don't think you'd gain much by having someone else do what you're asking for. You'd find yourself in the same situation again when you need the next animated character.

Having said that, however, I would enjoy investing some time in helping you make your own improved animation. Ultimately most of the effort would come from you, I would just give some pointers. Would you be interested in this?

I'm just not good at art and visuals

I don't think you'd gain much by having someone else do what you're asking for. You'd find yourself in the same situation again when you need the next animated character.

Having said that, however, I would enjoy investing some time in helping you make your own improved animation. Ultimately most of the effort would come from you, I would just give some pointers. Would you be interested in this?

Yes! That would be perfect. So, any pointers?

[subheading]Research[/subheading]
How much research or preparation did you do before making that animated sequence?
If you just open the program and start drawing straight away then you're not giving yourself enough of a chance to make something that looks good.
When you see the result of that you'll most likely lose confidence, thinking that you don't have any skill with visual arts.

This is not true. You can get improving results if you prepare yourself with enough research and collect enough reference material.
Nobody knows everything, not even a veteran animator. Professionals use reference for almost everything; they support their creative minds with as much information as possible to get the best results.

You need to know how an action looks like before you can reproduce it.
In your particular case, the action that you want your character to do is 'walking' or 'running.'
Therefore, you need to research what happens mechanically with your body when you're walking, so stand up and perform the action yourself: walk for a while with the speed that you want, and observe how your body works.

You also need to do some analytical observation. Collect reference material - images, videos, anything that you can get your hands on that you think represents the type of action that you want, even if it's a few frames from an entire film that have that particular action that you were looking for.



[media]https:[/media]

Pause the video, go back to the points that interest\confuse you. Study them.
Is this type of action cyclic, is it random etc.? -> It looks like a cyclic type of action, it repeats itself through time.
What parts of the body are involved in this action? -> Almost all of the parts seem involved, but the spine seems to be straight and unchanging. The legs have the broadest movement, the arms move less.

In case you're trying to do an action that's very specifc ("jumping on one leg while waving your arms in a spiral manner") you'll need to make your own reference since there won't be any to find on the internet or in films.
Level a portable camera or smartphone on some stand, start recording a video and do the action yourself - even if it's a walking action that would get you out of the camera frame, you only need one entire cycle anyway, like three steps of a run, and not to walk a mile. Do a few takes and then transfer to your computer to watch it. Using this you'll never run out of reference even for the most odd of actions.

You need to study what you can on traditional animation. It helps you get better and more expressive sequences, and trains your eye on recognizing all of the necessary keyframes to carry out the action:
- http://embots.dfki.de/doc/seminar_ca/finalReportAkkuzhyna.pdf
- http://www.jasonryananimation.com/ramp-up-tutorials.html
- http://www.animationphysics.com/

Once you have done this research you can start producing frames.

[subheading]Production[/subheading]
Some artists have a specific process on how they create 2D animated characters.

(Artist: Syosa)





(Artist: Kou)

The Process:

• Start by drawing all the frames as base skeleton\stick-figure poses. This focuses on the motions (keyframes, timing, expression etc.) and scales.
• Fill the skeletons with the volumes for the subject being animated as a silhouette (add "flesh" to the bones). This focuses on shapes (how the volumes of the subject transform through time), but it's a rough pass without much detailing. The volumes are either coloured with a single colour or with a simple breakdown by bodypart or material with the base colour.
• Add the details with shading, texturing and dithering where it applies over the shapes. The detail is added on top of the volumes you worked on the previous step. You can add animated accessories here as well. This is the final step and after this the animation sequence should be ready for use.

Getting the skeleton frames to look right is the most important step, because this will drive the other steps. If the skeleton version works, feels smooth and reads well then all the rest should work too.
All of these steps require attention to perspective: the shape of any object changes as the object rotates in space, so you need to take this into account when drawing. For example, a cylinder may look like a circle when you look at it from a profile view:



Now, regarding your walking sequence.
Since you don't have much experience yet with animation, you should draw (with pencil and paper) your character a few times from different viewpoints so you get a notion of how the character looks like.
Then you do the research on the action as seen previously.
Then, working exclusively with skeletons\stick-figures, you can break the action into keyframes (for the most extreme poses) and add in-between frames as needed so there's a transition between keyframes.

I gave it a try for a single frame, though I painted it with a much higher resolution than what is needed for pixel art for clarity. You could draw one-pixel-thick skeletons for your animated pixel art with that character. An artist recommends that you use a graphics tablet (Wacom etc.) for painting, since it's much quicker to design the rough base poses with skeletons that way, and then you can just downsize these rough poses to pixel art size.
This is a "standing" frame skeleton.


This is a running frame with the skeleton pass, a volume pass and then the detail pass.
I realize now that I should have coloured both the arms and both the legs differently in the volume pass (the graphic in the middle) so it would be easier to tell them apart when working on the volume pass. If you look at the artist process image by Kou you'll see that he uses different colours so you can clearly tell either arm and either leg from each other.



Note that you need to do all of the frames in the sequence per pass - you don't start the volume pass until you have thoroughly tested the skeleton version and made sure that all the skeleton frames are working. You don't start the detail pass until you make sure that all the frames in the volume pass are working.

I cannot recommend enough that you animate your sprites with the aid of a pixel art animation editor such as ProMotion, Graphics Gale etc. which allow you to quickly flip between frames and see if there's any visual problems that you need to address. In this process of character animation you go back and forth hundreds of times while working on one of the passes, correcting and repainting small clusters of pixels, seeing if the progression of frames works and if it looks smooth and fluid, if the scales are right (if body parts don't grow or shrink suddenly) etc.
Depending on the action being animated, it can take several hours to complete a piece.