On a related topic, I'd like to see the tools have more support for exporting separate animations, instead of having everything in a single image.
I always create separate images per animation, all my mapping rules are targeting that.
The big image I posted a few posts above is for getting an good overview and make it easier for me to find.
Aside from that I only concatenate images when I upload them to reduce the amount of images, they are always combined with "magick montage -mode concatenate -tile 1x -background none " or something similar.
My character generator also uses a canvas per animation in contrast to sanderfrenken's. In my eyes those character generators are only previews and combining and palette swapping should be done by the engine, there is no reason to have more than one color of everything. Modular bodies does create one big sheet in the last step, but sheets per animation in the second last one.
That's also why I wouldn't attribute any submission, which just replaces the palette with another already existing one or who concatenate or reorder other submissions. That edit does not get past the threshold of originality needed by copyright law, I can easily recreate that in a minute or so.
Color palettes themself are also not copyrightable, but I credit them out of respect (not the considerate one, but the one with high esteem).
but it discourages adding new animations because modifying the sheet breaks compatibility with existing assets.
There are some defacto standards of arranging the animations. I put the die/hurt animation first, since it's usually added as last, which is bad compatibility wise.
Okay, I added the running animation und updated the post above. (I will keep it updated, I don't see a reason to post it multiple times)
Also, the left-facing bow and thrust animations have the wrong head.
I only converted all animations to the attached palette and fixed issues arising from doing that. I kept the heads as wrong as wulax created them. I will create a new sheet for the edited versions, with markings on [E]dited frames.
Are you saying the layering is a bad idea?
At least the layering, how I did it, wasn't a good idea.
I made those layers foremost for reassembling the bodies correctly, that alone makes it more complicated. I tried to reuse parts for several frames, which also required to draw some pixels which aren't visible. I had a layer for front/back arms/legs, but the left/right arm/leg was always completely on one layer. It does not work that way.
What might work is: (I see sholders as part of the arm)
arm parts below torso
torso with legs
arm parts below head
head
arm parts above head
This does not allow to use left and right hand separately, well neither was it really possible before. But that could also be interesting. Like a walking animation where one arm has less motion because it's carrying a spear/bow. It could make it easier to draw weapons, but it's only worth it if there is not many clothing pixels that have to be redrawn, or even better if none have to.
that will make attribution/record-keeping much easier.
I agree in pvigier's case, but at least for the characters bases we should aim for one submission with multiple authors/maintainers. We can still specify per animation attribution in a markdown or text file and from this threads history we should know who did what. I'd expect that to make it a lot easier for those want to create new clothings.
Command-line "build" tools, which take a partial spritesheet and construct a full spritesheet (possibly with multiple layers) with all animations, duplicated/mirrored images, etc.
But I agree with BenCreating there, those who upload submissions have to use them, that includes being able/feeling comfortable to do so.
Basto's code for the heads
I used it only for heads, but it was never limited to them.
So it might be helpful if it could also generate GIF previews.
If this is relating the the build/shell tools, that can easily be done with short makefile:
It might be helpful if there was a command-line version of these as well, which could be incorporated into a build process.
Well, for that you can backport my cli-version of the character creator, which runs with nodejs.
Regarding the animations: I used a looking up head in my lying down sketch, but in general I don't think they are a good idea. People who can't really draw won't be able to port old assets to new animations, if they use new perspectives resulting from tilting/rotating. The sideways heads are already a pain, the original "hurt" animation as well. I would actually prefere to have a running animation based on the jumping (third and fourth frame) animation, which does not tilt heads. That's why I tend to forget that there is already a running animation.
And please write me basxto in ASCII. If I'd rename myself, links to my account would break.
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 always create separate images per animation, all my mapping rules are targeting that.
The big image I posted a few posts above is for getting an good overview and make it easier for me to find.
Aside from that I only concatenate images when I upload them to reduce the amount of images, they are always combined with "magick montage -mode concatenate -tile 1x -background none " or something similar.
My character generator also uses a canvas per animation in contrast to sanderfrenken's. In my eyes those character generators are only previews and combining and palette swapping should be done by the engine, there is no reason to have more than one color of everything. Modular bodies does create one big sheet in the last step, but sheets per animation in the second last one.
That's also why I wouldn't attribute any submission, which just replaces the palette with another already existing one or who concatenate or reorder other submissions. That edit does not get past the threshold of originality needed by copyright law, I can easily recreate that in a minute or so.
Color palettes themself are also not copyrightable, but I credit them out of respect (not the considerate one, but the one with high esteem).
There are some defacto standards of arranging the animations. I put the die/hurt animation first, since it's usually added as last, which is bad compatibility wise.
Okay, I added the running animation und updated the post above. (I will keep it updated, I don't see a reason to post it multiple times)
I only converted all animations to the attached palette and fixed issues arising from doing that. I kept the heads as wrong as wulax created them. I will create a new sheet for the edited versions, with markings on [E]dited frames.
At least the layering, how I did it, wasn't a good idea.
I made those layers foremost for reassembling the bodies correctly, that alone makes it more complicated. I tried to reuse parts for several frames, which also required to draw some pixels which aren't visible. I had a layer for front/back arms/legs, but the left/right arm/leg was always completely on one layer. It does not work that way.
What might work is: (I see sholders as part of the arm)
This does not allow to use left and right hand separately, well neither was it really possible before. But that could also be interesting. Like a walking animation where one arm has less motion because it's carrying a spear/bow. It could make it easier to draw weapons, but it's only worth it if there is not many clothing pixels that have to be redrawn, or even better if none have to.
I agree in pvigier's case, but at least for the characters bases we should aim for one submission with multiple authors/maintainers. We can still specify per animation attribution in a markdown or text file and from this threads history we should know who did what. I'd expect that to make it a lot easier for those want to create new clothings.
But I agree with BenCreating there, those who upload submissions have to use them, that includes being able/feeling comfortable to do so.
I used it only for heads, but it was never limited to them.
If this is relating the the build/shell tools, that can easily be done with short makefile:
%.gif: %.png
magick convert -background none -delay 16 $< -crop 64x +repage -set dispose background -loop 0 -layers optimize -compress LZW $@
Well, for that you can backport my cli-version of the character creator, which runs with nodejs.
Regarding the animations: I used a looking up head in my lying down sketch, but in general I don't think they are a good idea. People who can't really draw won't be able to port old assets to new animations, if they use new perspectives resulting from tilting/rotating. The sideways heads are already a pain, the original "hurt" animation as well. I would actually prefere to have a running animation based on the jumping (third and fourth frame) animation, which does not tilt heads. That's why I tend to forget that there is already a running animation.
And please write me basxto in ASCII. If I'd rename myself, links to my account would break.
The spear should probably overlap the hand a bit and make it look like it's being hold, similar to how it's done in the thrust animation
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.
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