Sprite Animation Weekly #5 - Cruisin'

**Sinix** · August 18th, 2008, 09:50 AM

Dust yourselves off, we're on to another Monday. Since last week was focused on animation, this week will be more tailored to the non-animators.

Week 5 - Cruisin'
The challenge this week is to make an automobile in motion. Technically you're just creating the illusion of movement, loopability is required this week. There are various ways to create the illusion of movement, mostly with the wheels, but also with lighting and bounce... that's up to you. The type of automobile is optional, it can be real or fantasy, historical or futuristic, whatever. The angle is also optional this week. No size limit.

Example borrowed from "http://www.metalslugsprites.net":

Have fun.

Other Notes
Just wanted to add that I've been storing up a good number of future topics.. I'll be trying to vary the topic each week... characters, creatures, industrial/props, special effects, misc. I know they won't all be as active.

**skvv** · August 18th, 2008, 11:14 AM

hrm, didn't know about this til i saw it in the RSS on my homepage, looks fun. i know designing sprites is an art all it's own, you know of any good sources on the net that help you design for a small format?

**Lake** · August 18th, 2008, 03:38 PM

how specific is this? can we do any motorized ground vehicle with wheels? (i.e. trains, motorcycles)

**Anid Maro** · August 18th, 2008, 06:25 PM

Originally Posted by skvv

hrm, didn't know about this til i saw it in the RSS on my homepage, looks fun. i know designing sprites is an art all it's own, you know of any good sources on the net that help you design for a small format?

Tsugomo wrote up a pretty nice tutorial about pixel work. To sum up sprite work in a little phrase, it's all about economy. You've got a limited amount of space to work with and a limited amount of colors to use, so every pixel matters and reusable colors are a big plus.

For example look at the truck from Metal Slug. The bouncing animation is basically a shift of a few pixels up and down. The colors used on the driver's face are the same as the shade color of that tarp strapped above the rear wheel and the rust on the truck. Also look at the detail they put into the driver, or rather lack of... many times there just isn't room to put in too much.

**Sinix** · August 18th, 2008, 10:28 PM

Originally Posted by Lake

how specific is this? can we do any motorized ground vehicle with wheels? (i.e. trains, motorcycles)

Sure, I just hope to see some interesting designs.

**Anid Maro** · August 22nd, 2008, 01:03 PM

Here's my "preliminary" sprite. Actually the animation and everything is completely done, it's just that GIMP is being decidedly... gimp in it's compiling of my gif.

The GIMP's "optimize" option is pretty nifty and if anybody pulls this gif apart into it's individual frames they'll see how it's a wierd overlapping of different elements using combine frame progression instead of replace, which is pretty nifty I have to admit. However it didn't set my transparency at all and inflated the color palette to 32 colors (when I'm using only 4 colors!), so it's not transparent (thankfully my background color is the same as the forum here) and possibly quadruple the size it should be.

Anyhow I'm finding alternate gif compilers and I'll probably be posting a "fixed" version on Sunday, which in all actuality should look exactly the same except it'll be transparent and have a smaller file size.

Edit: A'ight, got my palette reduced and transparency added... but it turns out transparency is incompatable with the nifty optimizing stuff I mentioned earlier from the GIMP. So end result is the file size was doubled. Ah well, learn somethin' new every day.

**Lake** · August 22nd, 2008, 03:01 PM

sorry I haven't been as up to this one, but I've been going through some stuff this week. I'll definitely post some stuff at least on sunday; probably on saturday.