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medli20 β Pixel art tutorial: Animation
Published: 2012-06-23 06:32:35 +0000 UTC; Views: 61827; Favourites: 2610; Downloads: 926
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Description
Addendum: if you have Photoshop CS2 or later, you can do pretty much everything you see above without the use of Imageready. Just go to Window > Animation and you'll get the little animation timeline window thingy.Also, if you want to upload animations on dA WITHOUT using a preview image, your animation MUST be 150x150 pixels or less. /end addendum
Since I've been getting asked a lot about how I animate my pixel arts, I figured I'd make a tutorial about how I do it. This tutorial only covers Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Imageready, but if you have any similar programs, you may be able to tweak this a bit to fit your program a little better.
I may end up making another animation tutorial later, using a freeware program since I realize that Adobe programs are not exactly cheap to acquire (unless you pirate it, which I really don't recommend doing). Anyway, have this for now.
Basic pixel art tutorial: (I may have to revise this later; it's a bit old)
Finished animation: (click to view)
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Comments: 128
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THANK YOU FOR THIS TUTORIAL!!!But i'll never be good on animation btw so here it is!Β fav.me/d9wnvus
:3 im not a good artist.
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I'm sorry, I'm new to this so I just wanted ask what you meant by "Pixeling". Like, are you using the pencil tool to ink over the lineart?
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If you're working in photoshop, change your transform settings to "nearest neighbor" instead of bicubic. Be sure to only scale in multiples of 100% otherwise your pixels will look ugly as heck when you scale them.
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medli20 Β why is it when i want to move the eyes or free form ( for example ) the skin of my character will move tooo why is it? and i can't hide it so that it looks like blinking please help me!
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Thank you very much for the helpful tutorial!
Please let me know what you think:
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thank you so much for the tutorial ! Β ;o;
i followed both of them and managed to make this.......
autumn-fest.deviantart.com/artβ¦
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so awesome and usefull!
thx for sharing lnowledge!
i'll use it for an RPG Maker project!
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thank youuuu for the tutorial <3 i managed to pull it off with sai and made it a gif in gimp!!Β
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Thank you very much for this useful tutorial!
I managed to do this thanks to your help <3Β Β
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You do the lineart over the colored layers, right?
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Hey there! I just wanted to stop by and thank you so much for this tutorial. I created this with your help:Β
Keep doing what you're doing, your art is fantastic!
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...I only have Gimp 2.8 And Sai oAo would I still be able to pull this off?
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I've been looking for an animation tutorial like this for ages!
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when i save the optimized version and view it i get these white outlines of boxed that appear and disappear :/ i don't know hat i'm doing wrong...
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Are you trying to use semi-transparent graphics? .gif files don't support partial transparency, so if you have any stray semi-transparent pixels, it'll convert them to a whitish color.Β
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ahhhh i might have some translucent pixels hiding in my image..... thankyou!
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thank you for this lovely informative tutorial. here is my first animation using your method.
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i used photoshop elements
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You have very gorgeous art and these animation are so pretty, I've always wanted to do one and now I could ;w;
Thank you very much for making this tutorial
Here is what I have made with its help:
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No problem; I'm glad to hear it was helpful!
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Thanks, I'm glad you found it to be helpful!
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Is there another program that is good for animating these for free? 0:
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I've just used GIMP, which is free to make something similar, here:
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Whoa, that's like, REALLY good ;0;!
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GIMP is a good one for pixeling.
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Really? O: i have gimp~! <3
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There are a few, but they require you to save the individual frames as .gifs or .pngs first. I've used MS GIF Animator before and it's pretty decent. If you don't want to download a program, ezimba Β (formerly iaza) is a pretty decent in-browser animator as well.Β
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alright, thanks a bunch~!
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can i ask something? i tried to do the same thing with a bobbing head but instead i moved the whole body.i tried and tried again, but eventualy gave up. this might be not professional : [link]
i wanted to move the stones one by one but it grabbed the whole layer and moved the other stones with..could you give me some advice?
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but it kind of sounds like you had the whole dragon on one layer, and the stones on another. If this is the case, you need to make sure you put each moving component on its own layer. This means you have a head layer, a body layer, a layer for each rock, etc.
If you try to lump them all in one layer and move them within the layer between frames, Photoshop will assume you want to edit that layer across all frames of animation, and update it accordingly. It sounds like a pain in the ass, I know, but it's actually a useful feature in other respects. In any case, it's a lot easier to make a new layer for everything you want to move separately than it is to select various parts of the same layer and move it that way.
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oh yeah you got a point hehe thank you so much for the advice!
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No problem; I hope it helps
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wow thanks for the tutorial :3 I always wanted to make an animation of Pixels :3 here's my first try 
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That looks great for your first try! Keep it up
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Hmm, I'd just say to pay close attention to how everything moves in relation to everything else. If you're working with a lot of different moving parts, it's easy to lose track of what has been moved, which can lead to somewhat clunky- or hiccupy-looking animation. Keeping your layers organized also helps in that regard.
Good luck!
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Look at that, I finally got around to using this tutorial. It helped me so much Here's the finished product of what I made [link]
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Wow, nicely done! The lineart and the animation both look remarkably smooth, which is quite impressive for a first attempt.
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