DawnSomewhere: @cosmichero:
You're trying to animate in Photoshop! Although it can be used for animation, it's really more of an editing tool. I did this in Toon Boom, which is a practical studio program. I wouldn't try this in Photoshop unless you're a masochist, but to get nice smooth-looking animation you'd want to show movement every 1/8th of a second at a minimum - which is to say if you're animating at 24 FPS, you'd draw a new image every three frames. They call that "animating on threes", and it's something they do to save money in kids' shows and the like. Most shows animate normal actions on twos, which is a new image every 1/12th second, and fast actions on ones, every 1/24th second.
So if you were to animate your gif at that level, which is maybe twenty seconds long, you'd be chewing through maybe 240 frames of work! I'm going to guess that's around 4000 layers based on how Photoshop moves things and how much is going on in your animation.
You did pretty well for a first art thing! If it turns out you like this stuff, I recommend looking into animation programs. It's a niche so a lot of the software can be expensive, but there are some feasible options. In this case I found Toon Boom worked really well because it can vectorize a png and its deformation tools make the noodle arms more flexible. You could also use Flash by putting all of the arm assets into symbols, but if you're going to spend money on something Flash is probably one of the most unstable and unreliable programs out there.
@MikeyTheFox:
Who couldn't love sad, unlucky, pineapple cat?
DawnSomewhere: Katia battles her inner demons. Loses anticlimactically.
Two hours rigging, three on animation! The arms bend, but that's done with a deformation tool. It would have been easier to animate with a bunch of straight parts!
Dramatic Descriptions
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You're trying to animate in Photoshop! Although it can be used for animation, it's really more of an editing tool. I did this in Toon Boom, which is a practical studio program. I wouldn't try this in Photoshop unless you're a masochist, but to get nice smooth-looking animation you'd want to show movement every 1/8th of a second at a minimum - which is to say if you're animating at 24 FPS, you'd draw a new image every three frames. They call that "animating on threes", and it's something they do to save money in kids' shows and the like. Most shows animate normal actions on twos, which is a new image every 1/12th second, and fast actions on ones, every 1/24th second.
So if you were to animate your gif at that level, which is maybe twenty seconds long, you'd be chewing through maybe 240 frames of work! I'm going to guess that's around 4000 layers based on how Photoshop moves things and how much is going on in your animation.
You did pretty well for a first art thing! If it turns out you like this stuff, I recommend looking into animation programs. It's a niche so a lot of the software can be expensive, but there are some feasible options. In this case I found Toon Boom worked really well because it can vectorize a png and its deformation tools make the noodle arms more flexible. You could also use Flash by putting all of the arm assets into symbols, but if you're going to spend money on something Flash is probably one of the most unstable and unreliable programs out there.
@MikeyTheFox:
Who couldn't love sad, unlucky, pineapple cat?
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Two hours rigging, three on animation! The arms bend, but that's done with a deformation tool. It would have been easier to animate with a bunch of straight parts!