What makes a Game Animation look BAD?

white animations like this one suck we got great animations out there transition frames fluid movements straight up fun animations but frankly I'm not that good at this stuff and so if I don't expect myself to make something great I can at least try and figure out what makes an animation terrible so that my animation can have that homemade kind of quirkiness to it where it's kind of disfigured but still has some charm so how do we get our animation to look correct or we should probably go step by step we start with bubbling the head up and down in a sign like movement and we add the leg movement and then lastly we animate the arm and to keep track of which arm is in front and which I would miss in the back we can color them separately to make sure we get the type of frame that looks the best there will be plenty of things to look out for since we will repeat the entire Run Cycle any frame that is slightly too different will stand out but all of this is tricky and we just want to ensure that our animation isn't bad so as a starter I think it can be good to reference other animations and do something similar but for your own character there are plenty of animations out there that you can refer to to get the basic movement correct and it's probably the best way to get a decent result without having to learn all the theory and if you haven't done animations before you will inevitably fail and it will look something like this or this this animation has actually kind of followed the process I outlined and in that sense it's kind of correct but it still looks bad why well for one it looks a bit Jagged this can be fine for a lot of games where having a few frames makes the movement feel quick and responsive I can get the Roboto there are very few frames but it still works same goes for eight doors few frames but it still looks good however in this animation I'm adding enough frames to make it look like I'm trying to make a fluid movement but I'm not inserting enough frames to make it look fluid so it just looks bad easy fix we just add more frames right but before we do that there's something else that makes this animation look bad the character feels off here is this kind of puffy soft looking guy but when he's running he's suddenly all muscular it's extremely important to send the same message in this animation in Wonderboy the dragon looks kind of chubby in its idle animation and still kind of chubby when running in order it's kind of thin and agile when stunning still that same idea is sold when it's running but it's not just important when it comes to the body but also the message we want to solve with the character if we look at etors we have this grumpy looking character when she's running that same message is being conveyed the face is frowning and the character is leaning a lot with the really strong arm movements making the character look determined in her movements and while selling the idea for the character really well like to have an eight Taurus and guacameleon might be difficult we can still make sure not to send conflicting ideas for the character if the character has a rugged person Idol then it should have a rugged post when running and if we have a quite unassuming pose in Idol like in momodora that is kept consistent when running which just looks like a fairly standard run now there is a small problem here for our animation the Idol makes the character feel a bit insecure perhaps but if we go all out like they haven't limbo and make the characters Running Animation feel too awkward then we also expect the controls to feel a bit awkward so I think the main thing we should do is go for a fairly standard run but still make the character look a bit puffy so we aren't striving for perfectly consistent just making sure to avoid the extremes of a conflicting miss it prioritizing character consistently is important but it should probably not come at the expense of game Wheel and if you want our game to be as fluid and smooth platformer we probably need a character to look fairly fluid the animation limbo largely works because the controls themselves are somewhat janky but we can see the value of our fluid animation in games like dead cells the character feels super responsive and nice to control which is in part thanks to how well designed the controls are but animation also matches those controls making the overall experience fantastic so when we're animating this character I think we should remove all the athletic elements and make the character slightly thicker but we keep the agile Run Cycle to match the controls of the game now we have an animation that runs fairly decently we just need to add some small things like the mark on the chest to make the character feel a bit more 3D no need that detail we also add some small flaps to the ears that don't technically make sense but if we play the animation it kind of works the character still looks a bit awkward but it will most likely still feel responsive in game all of these faults into understanding the game that you're making there's a great sense of realism and atmosphere in a game like ghost song so the animation is fairly realistic and subdued at Other Extreme we have games like you which is simple and a bit quirky and the animation can be a static site message all in all I would personally say that the quirky will make your animation the more forgiving the audience will be in terms of correctness we can see this particularly well in games with regular animation look at a game like cuphead we can see how the shoulders and arms swing back and forth as the character runs this is how people run and if we hand animator Movement we can do this fairly well for my mushroom character the same principle applies have to cycle will see the chest half the cycle will see the back of the character it makes the character look a bit more 3D but when you rig your character this can be tricky to achieve since you're working with static images so a lot of games just skip it all together look at steamworld dig which has an excellent animation in many ways but if we look at what's happening to the chest and arms the characters consistently leaning towards the camera it makes the character look a bit wonky and unrealistic this still works quite well in game like steamworld League because it's fits the style and Adventure Prost I've almost leaned into it with an even greater exaggeration of this unrealistic movement but once again game is quirky so it works but take a look at Tales of iron it wants to look dark and somewhat realistic so there's all the quirky link towards the camera would suddenly become awkward instead they have increased the degree to which we can see the character in profile so we look at the character from straight to the side instead of this we get this and now the characters runs with very little shoulder movement it's a bit stiff but it looks correct in Go song it works even better since the character is a bit robotic and stiff it just adds to the atmosphere all in all an animation that is technically incorrect can still work if we just match it with a quirky style a bad animation is sometimes bad because we try to sell the idea of something complex but then fail at it but if we sell the idea of something odd and funny the incorrectness can accentuate that this is taken to the extreme in Rogue Legacy where the animation is incredibly engraved from a realistic standpoint but it's entertaining to look at we don't see this and think that they can't animate we see it and recognize that it's intentional personally however I simply don't like this look one of the reasons I really prefer hand animation is because how much easier it is to get a bit of a 3D look in both of these animations the movement that we're getting is by no means perfect in fact we can argue that it's somewhat bad but it does look less flat than this if we think about it it's still kind of odd that the character is looking towards the camera but if we look around this seems to be the case in all games from Hollow Knight to Icon class the character consistently looks towards the camera when we as humans run we don't do this so why do we do it in games the biggest reason is to make the character look 3D if the character is entirely in profile the character looks flat but more than that we want to make sure the transition from left to right looks good and this is where we have to talk a bit about transition frames let's take a quick look at have a nice step and see what happens when the character turns did you catch it instead of just flipping the animation from one side to the next let's throw an extra frame in there where we see the character almost looking towards the camera that extra frame makes the character turn feel significantly more fluid but it can come at the cost if we add too many frames it can make the game feel less responsive this is still fairly common to do in hand Run games online does the same thing the character turns and there we have an extra frame making the transition smoother Chris takes this even further and adds different frames depending on which frame the character transitions from but I think this is over the top in fact there's something I'm not entirely sure I like about this transition in Greece the transition frame changes the silhouette of the character significantly so it sometimes brings attention to itself and doesn't quite make it look as fluid in my opinion but personally I love the animation of Chris and in terms of Animation I think it sticks out Above the Rest for my animation I want to start with adding two frames one transition from idle to running it's a really small shift but I think it adds to the movement overall and the one frame for the flip but we can see that when we make this transition frame from left to right it doesn't feel that smooth nowhere near as smooth as the transition from idle to running while this is a perfect example white can be important to not rely on your non-existent animation skills the reason it doesn't look fluid is because the head is flipped if you make your head transition just be a small adjustment and then we flip then it looks fluid as if there's some initial inertia but then a rapid turn and in a game it works as well it doesn't look too bad it's by no means perfect but it's a bit cleaner than what we started with I want to point out there that you can and might actually want to learn this stuff I do recommend reading the illusion of Life the animator survival kit and then game anim and if you don't like reading books you can search for the five fundamentals of game animation and the 12 principles of animation and if you wanted a brilliant stuff it's probably good to learn these things but for most of us we just want to make sure that animation isn't terrible and that is in part what I want to point out I can almost leave this animation kind of rough the legs are not entirely consistent over the movement in some frames the leg is thin and others it's slightly thicker some frames look anatomically off but when we see the movement as a whole I'm not sure we think about it too much this animation isn't brilliant like Hollow Knights it's not even great but at least it's not as terrible as before and that's good enough for me thanks for watching bye

Channel: Nonsensical 2D

Views: 11,490

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Id: z9Blp_n1aSc

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023