User:Stern

Animation Tutorial

It can take a lot of time to move a character idea from base frame to full animation. This rough guide is a compilation of quick and easy tricks to help bring the animator's creations to life.

Learn how to take a standing base frame:

To full animation:

For this tutorial, you will need:

A base frame of the unit -> (http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Creating_a_scratch_built_sprite)

A graphics editing program -> http://www.gimp.org/

Lets get started

When I begin to animate a character, I first divide the subject's moving parts into easy to distinguish colors. Here, I have modified Zerovirus's base frame of the Ghast into a mess of colors based on the monster's different limbs.

This part of the animation is called "Blocking." It allows you to quickly animate and perfect the full movement of your character without having to constantly re-adjust every little detail.

Kinematics

Building on concepts from Jetryl's Basic Animation Tutorial: http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Basic_Animation_Tutorial, your character is comprised of a "network" of many parts which are all hooked together. So when one of part of your character moves, the entire rest of the character must move in response. The magic of animation is "capturing" how your character moves and reacts through a series of frames.

The Network

It can be quite daunting to figure out where to start animating if the position of any one part of the character is dependent with respect to all of the others parts. Therefore it is valuable to understand the linkages throughout the anatomy of your character. For example, here is the baseframe of my Goblin Trumpeter and an edited version.

The character's core is colored green, the joints are outlined in red, and the "bones" are highlighted in blue.

Credits

Zerovirus for Ghast baseframe.