Roshambo: Now in Motion
One of the reasons Roshambo ended up derailing originally was that trying to animate a sprite in Photoshop is like placing your testicles on a desk covered in rusty nails and broken glass, then smashing them to a bloody pulp with a lump hammer.
I’m not kidding, Photoshop CS3 will allow you to animate frame by frame, but there is no onion skinning and skipping back and fourth between the frames was a chore, I spent most of my time guessing rather than observing the next frame, it was frustrating and in the end i gave up.
Well the other day by chance i discovered a free sprite animating software called Pixen by Open Sword, it’s pretty damn good, I can onion skin (only the previous layer but better than nothing) and skip back and forth between frames using keyboard shortcuts, meaning i can see what i’m trying to achieve easier.
Now it’s not perfect, it does crash a lot, but so far i haven’t lost anything important, while getting to grips with this program and learning the shortcuts, layout, etc, i’ve developed the frequent cmd-s habit. Also for some reason certain layers seem to darken or lighten slightly, i’m not sure why yet and as the Pixen forum is down i cannot ask why or for a solution, oh well.
Still, it’s free and has allowed me to throw together a rough breathe animation for my guy here, so i can’t complain, i’ll be able to flesh him out in Pixen easily then colour correct as needed in Photoshop afterwards, things are looking up!
Not perfect i know, the knees are floating all over the shop and the muscles are not convincing yet but as you can see this is just the rough, and i’m one hell of a messy artist, next time you see this he’ll be tightened up and looking sharp. Stay Tuned!
July 21st, 2010 at 11:58 PM
Not perfect? You’re kidding? Man, your work is great!!! How much time you take to developed this moviments?
Congratulations!!! Very nice sprites.
July 23rd, 2010 at 4:15 AM
Cheers mate, but yeah, it’s not perfect yet, i know what i want this to look like in my head so i know i have a lot of work ahead of me to get it to that point.
I usually get an hour or so work done on a night after i get in, it’s not much but my current job doesn’t allow me much more time to devote to this project sadly.
The funny thing is that for all the effort i’m putting into this guy, he won’t be used in the final game, this is just a test sprite, the character won’t even look like this in his final revision! I don’t know why i continue to work on him other than to gain more experience with Pixen and because i don’t like to leave thngs unfinished, i have some annoying habits i guess