Are there any LPC ladders that this would need to match?
"mountains, cliffs, walls, and slopes" from original assets has latters, but I would not make an animation for the diagonal ones
Hurt/impact
The first few frames of this should be the guard/block animation. Otherwise, we would need a second version of this for blocking.
We are not required do animations really sequentially, we can start with two different transition frames that guides guard and stand to the same animation.
Punch
We can likely just use the lunge/stab, or the slash if we use Eliza's.
If this is a separate animation, we should probably just change the hands compared to stab, that way only gloves have to be redrawn.
Shoot, two-handed (rifle)
Possibly use the thrust arm position for carrying, and move it to the bow position for firing.
It would be desirable if Skorpio's guns or repositioned versions of them can be used with it.
Regarding the swimming animation there should be a new frame between first and second, where hands are really pressed together and pointing forward like the hand gesture some japanese people do when bowing. He has to part the water somehow. Third frame can work, we have to see how this looks in animation. Second and third probably need a different different hands, but it absolutely makes sense to take that one fram from grabbing.
I attached an example for how sleeping could be done. The arms are from standing, the legs are from walking, the torso has a new deformation (belly and chest one pixel higher, but it's basically from the walking frame) and the head has a new perspective, but it could also be used with the regular heads, they have the same outline after all. Especially if the head is resting on a pillow it would be plausible if the head is more angled. Lying on the side probably needs more modifications
For something like the walk cycle, I wouldn't want to see any modifications that change the outline. It would break compatibility with old assets, without adding a lot of value. Small changes to the shading, maybe, but nothing beyond that.
True that, I think I accidentially changed the outline in one frame and on purpose on the side walking torsos. I have to do a image diff later and see how bad it is. I got a bit lazy lazy with the sideway torsos at some point.
The common animations shouldn't change their basic shape: original assets and wulax, for the rest it probably does not matter much, there it's better if new ones are easy to create/port
Each color is a torso shape
I don't know how you define shape, but I know that in sidewalking the second (not black) torso is one pixel shorter in height than the first. the fourth and sixth (this one is marked as duplicate, but isn't one) one have definitely different shapes, the right side of them have different angles (that's the thing I changed in mine) and they also all have different textures even with same shape, since the nipples are moving to indicate a slight torso rotation as well as arm shadows.
And I'd expect thrust to use both torsos of slash, since it uses both feet from there and feet, so they probably have the same rotation.
Speaking of automation, I'd really like to see tools with a UI. The shell scripts we have are great, but in my experience, many artists won't use anything without a visual interface.
I think that's an argument for well decumented and easy to parse mapping format, so that various tools can be built for it.
It would most likely be a one button application, unless you want to support multiple clothings at a time. But you could visualize which original part went where in the final spritesheet, which would be probably very nice.
I should keep in mind to make the steps I take as easy to implement as possible and not use too much magic from Image Magic.
Scripts are a lot faster to develop and change, so I don't think an GUI makes before we are sure what steps and layers we need. My focus is indeed more on batch processing huge quantities, even though the current script is quite slow in doing that. duplimap.sh is awfully slow :/. And you also can always build GUI applications, which wrap some cli-only stuff, but that would be probably very ineffective in this case.
I'm also thinking about whether could be handled differently, theoretically one could draw some shadow mask and let all shadowed pixels climb in the palette/colormap, since that seems how shadow is often drawn. (arm over torso, head over torso and such)
I attached the mapped torso spritesheet, not sure how obvoious it is how different some are and where I cheated. (did not attach them before since that blows up everything a lot)
And I'm thrilled to see your take on the swimming stuff.
I'm gonna add one frame from slash and shoot to my tests, since they have have nice head related overlaps. But aside from that I'll stick to walkcycle for now until I've found a satisfying format for mapping, layering and cutting. It's hard to separate torso and arms, because of the shadow cast by arms and all the stuff going on around the sholders.
I imagine swimming could be something like this, reusing three frames from spellcasting.
The guy would do dry swimming and the water is added with an overlay to cover clothings (shirts, but not belts or pants), this would allow to use the spellcast clothings as is. Only four new arms have to be drawn per direction
(all what I say about animations is only about male)
Frame duplicates and mirrors (if you ignore the head) are nice indeed, also for transitioning to standing pose or a different animation. Walkcycle has two frames, which can transition to to standing, so it's never more than 3 frames away from standing. This is especially for actions which are very likely interruptible like walking and running, it should also not look too bad if somebody decides to directly switch to standing. It would probably also be good if you can transition from walking to running and back every frame.
But there are also other ways of reuse, you don't have to duplicate the frame, just legs, torso or arms helps already a lot. You don't have to completely redraw and instead just reposition and draw the transitions between body parts. Thrust animation uses this a lot. From food wear perspective it's 2-3 new frames per direction, despite having 5 completely unique frames. One frame of the sideways animation is nearly the same in thrust and bow shooting, only the wrist rotation is different.
I think the original cup submissions should be definitely streamlined since they were developed in parallel. Drag and thrust sideway animations could be more similar. Gun shooting does not really look good, I think some parts of bow shooting could be merged into it. Both utilize outflung arms, but they are drawn differently.
And maybe we should produce some visual manual on how to draw the frames, what can be reused etc. Guidance to which frames (the least covered version like frame 10 from bow shooting) should be drawn first, since they can be reused in other frames. Or even the production of dummy frames derived from my layered stuff to ease drawing of parts, which are reused but also covered a lot. Layers could also help to build visualizations where duplicate parts are tinted red.
This would help showing new contributors how much work has to be done. I only once drew something for the sprite sheets and remember that I drew a lot of duplicates, but only realized that when it was too late.
I haven't yet started playing with layered clothes, but while looking through the existing animations, I realized that won't be enough. I'll also need to make cut outs and make sure that body part transitions aren't cut out. Shoulder should be behind the head, but the forearm and hand in front of it. Shoulder of the back arm should be infront of the torso (I think armor needs this) but the rest has to be behind the body. The big pro for automating clothes is that you can easily apply retextures like my Major Triumph shield to the base frames and immediately have a full spritesheet.
Another huge problem with LPC is information distribution. Whatever we agree on in here will be unknown to new contributors. I think ideally we should link the LPC Collection, add an extended art guide for the animations, maybe even integrate or link some sprite generators on lpc.opengameart.org. The code is open source, the linked repo has vanished, but https://github.com/OpenGameArt/LiberatedPixelCup does still exist.
Is sleeping more than standing facing down and combining it with closing eyes from spellcast?
Swimming is probably just the upper body and keeping everything under water hidden?
Chopping should also be waist high, biggest difference towards crafting is probably dual-wielded tool usage. This overlaps somewhat with the tileset reworking of tables and objects you can put on them, since the animation will interact with those objects.
Carry shares, at least if it's overhead, problems with bow shooting and every other gesture that would press arms or hands against the head. It would only work for the human heads and has to be redone for every differently sized head.
Handshakes are also highly problematic, it would pretty much be restricted to bare handed characters since every glove would need cut outs for every other glove. Or I'm overthinking this.
EDIT: This animation also does exist, I have no idea how that should be called [LPC] caeles' art, but some frames could be reused for crafting.
I'm done splitting the walkcycle.
I modified it a bit here and there.
I'll also attach a gif and recombined spritesheet.
But I have yet to playe around with this and clothings.
Any ideas which clothing submissions are best for testing? Something in fabric (flexible) as well as metal (stiff) and with few (maybe just standing) animations supported as well as many (original animations and wulax's) would be practical, I guess.
EDIT2: I expanded the mapping syntax a bit. index;; defaults to index;0;0 and there are now multiple ways of defining the index. :row:column, #column (with current row in csv), -index mirrors the tile and can be combined with : and #, otherwise the index is just counted left to right, top to bottom. (the last notation is impractical if the image width is expected to change) # is practical if the image is organized in 4 rows, each for a direction. : is practical for mirroring left direction for getting right direction.
I would like to see them go in the opposite direction---fewer frames
I first switch my build system to what I used for the portraits. Then I'll update the heads, wanna include Ben's new wolf head and if possible the zombie. Then I'll try to split stuff into layers, I need that for (bow) shooting animation anyways, that's why I stopped last time. If that worked, I gonna see how hard it is to build/port clothings based on that.
And then I'll see what animations can be achieved by recombining the frames in new ways, well that's what the modular set is about ... creating new variation with as little as effort as possible. Maybe I can even get back to my superhero stuff, I stopped because it became annoyingly repetitive.
One-handed shoot (pistol)
Two-handed shoot (rifle)
As said, [LPC] Skorpio's SciFi Sprite Pack has a shooting animation. I looked into it again, it's two handed pistol _and_ two handed rifle in one. It's the walking animation with different hands, so this should benefit from layering, since only the arms have to be redone. (and we could easily make one handed shooting by giving the other hand a different animation)
I think I will continue using the simple csv format, which I used for positioning heads. It's just tile id, x-offset, y-offset. I will extend it so that a negative id means it's mirrored, but aside from that it should be sufficient. Are there any other formats around?
head, torso, front arm, back arm, front leg, back leg
That's probably the best idea.
And I just counted the frames of original assets (walkcycle, slash, hurt, spellcast), they have 94 frames, of which are 40 either duplicates or mirrored versions of other ones.
I don't think I start using more layers yet, but I'll try to improve the build process a bit. I'll just play around with the original walk cycle and layers in a temporary directory.
The icons on the left do like the pixel art icons not fit the style of the rest of the gui, so does the skull icon.
You have to use HTML tags on this site:
<b>bold</b>
<img src="u.rl" alt="alternative text">
"mountains, cliffs, walls, and slopes" from original assets has latters, but I would not make an animation for the diagonal ones
We are not required do animations really sequentially, we can start with two different transition frames that guides guard and stand to the same animation.
If this is a separate animation, we should probably just change the hands compared to stab, that way only gloves have to be redrawn.
It would be desirable if Skorpio's guns or repositioned versions of them can be used with it.
Regarding the swimming animation there should be a new frame between first and second, where hands are really pressed together and pointing forward like the hand gesture some japanese people do when bowing. He has to part the water somehow. Third frame can work, we have to see how this looks in animation. Second and third probably need a different different hands, but it absolutely makes sense to take that one fram from grabbing.
I attached an example for how sleeping could be done. The arms are from standing, the legs are from walking, the torso has a new deformation (belly and chest one pixel higher, but it's basically from the walking frame) and the head has a new perspective, but it could also be used with the regular heads, they have the same outline after all. Especially if the head is resting on a pillow it would be plausible if the head is more angled. Lying on the side probably needs more modifications
True that, I think I accidentially changed the outline in one frame and on purpose on the side walking torsos. I have to do a image diff later and see how bad it is. I got a bit lazy lazy with the sideway torsos at some point.
The common animations shouldn't change their basic shape: original assets and wulax, for the rest it probably does not matter much, there it's better if new ones are easy to create/port
I don't know how you define shape, but I know that in sidewalking the second (not black) torso is one pixel shorter in height than the first. the fourth and sixth (this one is marked as duplicate, but isn't one) one have definitely different shapes, the right side of them have different angles (that's the thing I changed in mine) and they also all have different textures even with same shape, since the nipples are moving to indicate a slight torso rotation as well as arm shadows.
And I'd expect thrust to use both torsos of slash, since it uses both feet from there and feet, so they probably have the same rotation.
I think that's an argument for well decumented and easy to parse mapping format, so that various tools can be built for it.
It would most likely be a one button application, unless you want to support multiple clothings at a time. But you could visualize which original part went where in the final spritesheet, which would be probably very nice.
I should keep in mind to make the steps I take as easy to implement as possible and not use too much magic from Image Magic.
Scripts are a lot faster to develop and change, so I don't think an GUI makes before we are sure what steps and layers we need. My focus is indeed more on batch processing huge quantities, even though the current script is quite slow in doing that. duplimap.sh is awfully slow :/. And you also can always build GUI applications, which wrap some cli-only stuff, but that would be probably very ineffective in this case.
I'm also thinking about whether could be handled differently, theoretically one could draw some shadow mask and let all shadowed pixels climb in the palette/colormap, since that seems how shadow is often drawn. (arm over torso, head over torso and such)
I attached the mapped torso spritesheet, not sure how obvoious it is how different some are and where I cheated. (did not attach them before since that blows up everything a lot)
And I'm thrilled to see your take on the swimming stuff.
I'm gonna add one frame from slash and shoot to my tests, since they have have nice head related overlaps. But aside from that I'll stick to walkcycle for now until I've found a satisfying format for mapping, layering and cutting. It's hard to separate torso and arms, because of the shadow cast by arms and all the stuff going on around the sholders.
I imagine swimming could be something like this, reusing three frames from spellcasting.
The guy would do dry swimming and the water is added with an overlay to cover clothings (shirts, but not belts or pants), this would allow to use the spellcast clothings as is. Only four new arms have to be drawn per direction
(all what I say about animations is only about male)
Frame duplicates and mirrors (if you ignore the head) are nice indeed, also for transitioning to standing pose or a different animation. Walkcycle has two frames, which can transition to to standing, so it's never more than 3 frames away from standing. This is especially for actions which are very likely interruptible like walking and running, it should also not look too bad if somebody decides to directly switch to standing. It would probably also be good if you can transition from walking to running and back every frame.
But there are also other ways of reuse, you don't have to duplicate the frame, just legs, torso or arms helps already a lot. You don't have to completely redraw and instead just reposition and draw the transitions between body parts. Thrust animation uses this a lot. From food wear perspective it's 2-3 new frames per direction, despite having 5 completely unique frames. One frame of the sideways animation is nearly the same in thrust and bow shooting, only the wrist rotation is different.
I think the original cup submissions should be definitely streamlined since they were developed in parallel. Drag and thrust sideway animations could be more similar. Gun shooting does not really look good, I think some parts of bow shooting could be merged into it. Both utilize outflung arms, but they are drawn differently.
And maybe we should produce some visual manual on how to draw the frames, what can be reused etc. Guidance to which frames (the least covered version like frame 10 from bow shooting) should be drawn first, since they can be reused in other frames. Or even the production of dummy frames derived from my layered stuff to ease drawing of parts, which are reused but also covered a lot. Layers could also help to build visualizations where duplicate parts are tinted red.
This would help showing new contributors how much work has to be done. I only once drew something for the sprite sheets and remember that I drew a lot of duplicates, but only realized that when it was too late.
I haven't yet started playing with layered clothes, but while looking through the existing animations, I realized that won't be enough. I'll also need to make cut outs and make sure that body part transitions aren't cut out. Shoulder should be behind the head, but the forearm and hand in front of it. Shoulder of the back arm should be infront of the torso (I think armor needs this) but the rest has to be behind the body. The big pro for automating clothes is that you can easily apply retextures like my Major Triumph shield to the base frames and immediately have a full spritesheet.
Another huge problem with LPC is information distribution. Whatever we agree on in here will be unknown to new contributors. I think ideally we should link the LPC Collection, add an extended art guide for the animations, maybe even integrate or link some sprite generators on lpc.opengameart.org. The code is open source, the linked repo has vanished, but https://github.com/OpenGameArt/LiberatedPixelCup does still exist.
Regarding the animations:
The grab animation is from Daneeklu's LPC submission, which was resubmitted as [LPC] Farming tilesets, magic animations and UI elements
I guess we need different kinds of push/pull, depending on the size of an object? Pushing a wheelbarrow is quite different from push a man-high rock in a.
Is sleeping more than standing facing down and combining it with closing eyes from spellcast?
Swimming is probably just the upper body and keeping everything under water hidden?
Chopping should also be waist high, biggest difference towards crafting is probably dual-wielded tool usage. This overlaps somewhat with the tileset reworking of tables and objects you can put on them, since the animation will interact with those objects.
Carry shares, at least if it's overhead, problems with bow shooting and every other gesture that would press arms or hands against the head. It would only work for the human heads and has to be redone for every differently sized head.
Handshakes are also highly problematic, it would pretty much be restricted to bare handed characters since every glove would need cut outs for every other glove. Or I'm overthinking this.
EDIT: This animation also does exist, I have no idea how that should be called [LPC] caeles' art, but some frames could be reused for crafting.
I'm done splitting the walkcycle.
I modified it a bit here and there.
I'll also attach a gif and recombined spritesheet.
But I have yet to playe around with this and clothings.
EDIT:
The mapping rules are located here
Any ideas which clothing submissions are best for testing? Something in fabric (flexible) as well as metal (stiff) and with few (maybe just standing) animations supported as well as many (original animations and wulax's) would be practical, I guess.
EDIT2: I expanded the mapping syntax a bit. index;; defaults to index;0;0 and there are now multiple ways of defining the index. :row:column, #column (with current row in csv), -index mirrors the tile and can be combined with : and #, otherwise the index is just counted left to right, top to bottom. (the last notation is impractical if the image width is expected to change) # is practical if the image is organized in 4 rows, each for a direction. : is practical for mirroring left direction for getting right direction.
EDIT3: I guess I'll go with:
I first switch my build system to what I used for the portraits. Then I'll update the heads, wanna include Ben's new wolf head and if possible the zombie. Then I'll try to split stuff into layers, I need that for (bow) shooting animation anyways, that's why I stopped last time. If that worked, I gonna see how hard it is to build/port clothings based on that.
And then I'll see what animations can be achieved by recombining the frames in new ways, well that's what the modular set is about ... creating new variation with as little as effort as possible. Maybe I can even get back to my superhero stuff, I stopped because it became annoyingly repetitive.
As said, [LPC] Skorpio's SciFi Sprite Pack has a shooting animation. I looked into it again, it's two handed pistol _and_ two handed rifle in one. It's the walking animation with different hands, so this should benefit from layering, since only the arms have to be redone. (and we could easily make one handed shooting by giving the other hand a different animation)
I think I will continue using the simple csv format, which I used for positioning heads. It's just tile id, x-offset, y-offset. I will extend it so that a negative id means it's mirrored, but aside from that it should be sufficient. Are there any other formats around?
https://github.com/basxto/lpc-shell-tools/blob/master/animation/head/fem...
That's probably the best idea.
And I just counted the frames of original assets (walkcycle, slash, hurt, spellcast), they have 94 frames, of which are 40 either duplicates or mirrored versions of other ones.
Since I can't add any zips here and since modular bodies is already a git repository, I think I gonna tinker with it on github: https://github.com/basxto/lpc-modular-characters
I don't think I start using more layers yet, but I'll try to improve the build process a bit. I'll just play around with the original walk cycle and layers in a temporary directory.
Pages