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No surprise that I had way too much fun with this one! And while I already had a good example to refer to with my
Daisy animation
, I figured I’d look for some more reference material to see if I could pull it off better this time around.
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After awhile I stumbled across this amazing animation tutorial by Felix Sputnik about how to animate a skipping character. And while I didn’t use his exact poses due to the size of my sprite and the limited number of animation frames, he did have some good insights about timing and the way the body will act like a giant spring. Besides, I gotta respect an animator who’s not afraid to put so much casual nudity in his works, and his skill is astounding!
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I did use a more exaggerated leg motion, and I briefly tried using Felix Sputnik’s arm poses but they didn’t really fit the personality of my character, so I fell back to using Daisy’s feminine arm gestures instead (They also don’t cover up the boobs). Getting the legs to move right turned out not to be too hard, but the twisting of the body made it difficult to transition between facing left and right, especially for the floppy breasts.
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But that’s because I got ahead of myself. I started moving them around before first figuring out how they attached to her body.
This version didn't quite look right
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So I went back and re-drew them. This time I started with a pair of simplified shapes that moved with the exact motion of her body… then I shifted them around just a bit to give them their own momentum. This works because they’re shifting relative to where the eye expects them to be on the body, so the eye is able to follow them easier. One frame seems to lead to the next.
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I’ve made this mistake before. You’d think I would have learned this lesson by now. What can I say? When I’m animating I’m eager to see the boobs dance!
