Okay! I'll present this in the form of an FAQ.
Q. What's an animation?
A. AARGH!
Q. What files can be used/are best for animations?
A. Gif or the incredibly obscure MNG. MNG is better, but.. it's almost non-existent.
Q. What programs can be used/are best for animations?
A. I use Photoshop Elements 2. It saves animated GIFs with no marked colour loss (colour loss is where the image is limited to only a few different colours) and has good frame-by-frame editing ability. Warning- do NOT use Imageready or CS2/3/4/whatever unless you know what you're doing. They suck terribly at being user-friendly.
Q. Give me an example of colour loss?
A. http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/9593 ... izejb2.gif
Q. What the freaking heck is that?
A. Colour loss.
Q. No, I meant- oh, never mind.
A. Neverminding.
Q. Is there a secret method to making good animations?
A. Yes, although some might disagree. It's all to do with physics. It's difficult, but once you master getting things to "move" as they should, it's cake. Not literally.
Q. Show me some bad physics.
A. Sure- this has bad physics. Both jumps have little or no acceleration/weight effects. This is also an example of sprite animation.
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/8816/94439183oo2.gif
Q. Okay, what about some good physics?
A. http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/518/ ... nonhv9.gif
Watch the hydralic jack carefully- at the end it nicks the edge of a box, and this affects both the jack and the box.
Q. Haha! A jack in the box!
A. Oh for..
Q. *cough* Er, so.. yeah. Anything else I should know?
A. Practice makes perfect, as does having a heck of a lot of time on your hands and superhuman patience.
Shall add to it as need arises.
Q. You do realise you're talking to yourself.
A. I am?
Q. Yeah.
A. Thinking like that makes me confused.
Q. You mean me.
A. No, me.
Q. I am me!
A. No, you're you!
Q. GAH! Stop trying to out-wit yourself!
A. Okay.
Q. Okay.
A & Q. Comments anyone?
Edity Addition- Specifics
Sprite Animation
Sprite animation is using sprites (tiny pictures that look like characters used in 2d games), perhaps from videogames or hand-made, to make animations. There are advantages to recolours or redesigns of pre-existing videogame sprites- they already have basic animation movements, like walking.
When animating sprites, it's important to remember that you don't need to use a new sprite for every single frame (frames are the individual images in the animation). Duplicating a frame then moving the sprite slightly in the direction it was going, and doing this for the rest of them (especially in running animations) keeps the motion smooth and the sprite doesn't go too fast. Sonic X makes use of this a lot, as they obviously don't wanna draw a new image for every single frame. (Might just point out that computers nowadays can generate images that look hand-drawn at 24 FPS [frames per second], which is freaking impressive.)
Also remember that, depending on your program, you can make quick edits to sprites, like expressions and eye movement. Other modifications can include lighting, explosions and most importantly, motion blurs. Motion blurs can make otherwise boring movements look as awesome as an Agent dodging bullets. Which, for those of you who haven't seen the Matrix, is very awesome indeed. Here are some examples..
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/8089/wallrunke0.gif
Blur in and wall jump.
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/8816/94439183oo2.gif
Bullet effects, Blur effects, Blood effects and other things Beginning with B. Including Bad physics, as Before.
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/3872/47516929jb1.gif
The unfinished sequel. Laser dodging ftw, but don't look at it too much- try observing the gun. When it fires, a split-second motion blur is applied to the character. This is a tried-and-true way to make any gunshot cool. Also watch for the shells and recoil animation.
Check out
http://www.stickpage.com/wpnfiregameplay.shtml
for a game which uses these effects, and see it's worth. A nice thing about this game is that you can turn the effect off, to see what it looks like without it.
Couple good physics with accurate motion blurs and the aesthetics increase threefold.
Slow Motion!
Slow motion has a simple concept (slowing everything down), but it can be very difficult to animate. It isn't as easy to glaze over physics problems- you need to be pin-point accurate, or else it'll look bad.
Several more points-
1. Remove motion blurs unless it's moving really, really fast.
2. Bullets should be seen. Adding trails looks purdy, too.
3. Gunshots need explosions as the shot is fired. This is also important in dark places. See this for reference, but bear in mind it isn't in slow motion.
http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/902/anvyfirejh6.gif
Again, note the shells.
4. A great thing about slow motion bullet dodging is that it's easy to make the bullets miss. Simply create the character doing a really complicated dodge, then go back and put in bullets, always missing by *this* much.
5. Blood effects are mostly based on your preferred style (as you can see, I like "hand drawn and messy". Doing it in slow motion is pretty much that- slow motion. No additional effects needed, except bullets, after impact with a human/creature/thing with blood needs to be trailing blood after exiting the body/thing with blood.
More to come.
Edit: More, as promised.
Stick animation!
Ho boy. This is an animation style with an enormous following. As much as I hate to do this, I have to admit that I've never done much more than dabbled in stickman animation. All I know is that it's easier in Flash, which I don't have.
Oh, and that motion blurs don't work as well.However, I wouldn't make a whole section just to say that. You might have noticed the style in which my surprisingly "fragile" laser cannon was made- I think it's just called "wireframe". Like building stuff out of stick figures. It's crazy difficult with larger objects moving in tandem- those five or so frames with the laser elevating itself were ****ing difficult, as I'm a perfectionist- which means everything had to be in the right place. I re-drew that crane so many times.. And then we have the falling apart.. *shudder*
Surprisigly however, I prefer this animation style. It's quick, easy, gives you maximum flexibility and is simple to make in photoshop, using transparent layers then saving as opaque. I'm going to be doing another one just after finishing this update. ^^ So this thread can double as a showcase.
Edit:
Framerate, Sound and Length
GIF animations have several limitations, one of which you may not be aware. The first is framerate (how fast the animation goes). Generally speaking, you can define the framerate of a GIF, but if you set it at 0 delay between frames, an automatic delay is put in anyway. The second is sound- which obviously does not feature at all in GIFs. The third (which you probably won't know about unless you've made either a very big animation or a very long animation) is file size- GIF's have an annoying size limitation. I'm not sure if this limitation applies only to Photoshop Elements (as well as the framerate problem), however.
To compensate for all three problems, you'll have to settle with the image being slightly blurred, and the file being a movie (wmv, avi etc etc). For long animations, make it in segments of gifs that would flow continuously if in sequence.
Get Movie Maker (if you can't find it on your desktop or in the start menu, try searching your computer for "moviemk"), and import (drag them into the Movie Maker window) the gifs. Arrange them in the correct order. Add any music or sound effects you want. You can do that by dragging the sound files into the window as well. (Basic knowledge of how Movie Maker works is necessary to get it into the movie at the right points.) If you don't want to move the sound effects around in the clumsy timeline, I'd suggest using the Audacity sound editor program, which is free, can save in many formats, and is very easy to use.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/
As is, the animations will be saved in a movie with their default framerate. To speed things up a bit, look under Clip->Video->Video Effects, and then apply the 2x speed effect. Make sure to do it to all the gifs.
After that, it's a perhaps not-so-simple matter of saving. I'm not sure of this either; the differing types sometimes have advantages and sometimes don't. I find the best is DV-AVI, as it has the best quality and doesn't lose as much detail as the others.
Aspect ratio (the height of the movie compared to the width, don't worry, it isn't complicated
) may or may not be an issue. GIFs can be made in any size, but all movies (correct me if I'm wrong) use a 640x480/320xsomethingorother ratio (the same shape as a normal TV screen). Try to make the gifs as close to this ratio as possible. That's another thing I'm not sure of- when you save a really tall or really wide GIF, it either resizes the width and height to 640x480 ratio, or scales the whole image to fit and adds black space, like a widescreen movie.Edit: Fixed numerous grammer problems and added a few explanations of more advanced terms. (Terms are normal words used by geeks.) See? Aren't I just helpful.
