I'd been sitting on this placeholder frame for one of my enemies for a while, so today I'm animating it.
To make this puppy move, what I'll be doing is slicing it up into a bunch of pieces, retouching the pieces to fill in any blanks, get them all moving in the desired way, then retouch.
Here's my initial butcher job. I expanded them out so you can see them better.
I knew what I wanted to do was start iwth a basic idle motion. Kind of a bobbing up and down, with some parts pulsing grossly. What I decided to do was focus on just the downward motion, and after that's in place, I'll reuse some of those frames to bring it back up.
I use photoshop to do my animations. To start, I just did some basic sliding of the body parts to orient everything to the bottom point of its travel. This is 6 frames.
There's no retouching yet. In some cases I rotating a body part a bit by frame to keep it lined up.
Now with that more or less in place, I duplicated some of the frames for traveling downward and put them at the end, but this time in reverse order, so it travels back up. I also retouched it a bit with the brush over top of everything, to add some lighting and other oddities to make it look more natural. I also tweaked his arm and fingers some on the way back up to make it swing a bit more naturally.
This looks about right now, and it didn't take me much time at all. It's kind of a hybrid system -- It's sort of a 2D doll, but it's also sort of traditional. I did more or less the same thing to animate the player character, just with more work put in to get all the poses right.
I'm on schedule to do hopefully finish all of this enemy's remaining animations by the end of today.
