I need help with some animation.
 

I've been having some rather a rather difficult at making some of my dolls animation smooth. The little bouncing I have down to a science, I suppose. However, when it comes to other animation, it doesn't turn out as smooth as I'd like it. >_<


I think the blinking bothers me a bit because of the shape of the lash when it's closed. So I think I'm getting the hang of that just a tad bit more.
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...by_Alexara.gif



However... this next doll is the BANE of my existance. I spent more time on the animation than the actual pixeling itself. T_________T; I just am not happy with the animation... the customer loved it, but to me, it just looks sloppy.
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...ra-d3b7oiz.gif



What can I do to make my animations more smoother?




Edit: Fyi, I make the dolls completely myself. Base, hair, eyes, everything. Mouse made. xD

Really, you've got a great start, but you need to add more frames or shorted the time between frames. Here, let me pull out two (VERY VERY old, so bear with me) examples of my own work:

One of my first animations:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...lm/abbyani.gif
Aside from the fact that the hair isn't blowing realistically, the biggest problem with this is that you can TELL there's individual frames. You don't want the viewer to look at every picture; you want them to see it as a unified object.

As I progressed:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...sanimation.gif
With this one, there's still individual frames, but now you can tell I'm getting better at adding more frames at smaller intervals. The blood really does look as though it's dropping. The red really does fade into her face. (keep in mind I did these all traditionally, altering them frame by frame, so they won't be perfect!)

And finally as I started to study up a little more:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...lm/njdance.gif
You get a mostly-flawless, well-transitioned loop with relatively small frames.

As far as blinking goes, it looks much more natural if you space it out a little more. Generally speaking, you never want someone who's consistently blinking. During conversation, it's also natural for people to double blink:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...ianimation.gif

I hope that helps a little... if I can explain it better, let me know! You have adorable pixels c:

Ah, I kinda figured that was my main problem. With the blinking, do you think it'll help if I make the eyes half opened/closed when transitioning between open and closed as well? I know that the timing with frames for me tends to be my main problem. I just need to find my middle ground, I think.

It probably shows, but those are the only two dolls I've done that don't just bounce for the animation. Well... aside from this joke one I made because my friend commented about how the doll was so cute, she could bite the head off. xD
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l1.../KRISSY2-2.gif

But I reeeally wanted to make the eyes on the cloaked figure fade away instead of just *poof*, but I just couldn't find the right technique. >.<

Thank you for your help and you compliment. ^^ It actually has given me some ideas on what to do next. <3

You know, for a while I played with the half-open, half-closed method for a while, but it just seemed excessive, no matter how short I made the frame. I prefer a straight change myself, because blinks are so fast.

Ha ! I got a kick out of the blood spurting one xDD

To make the eyes fade away... well, there's two techniques. I'll describe both ways.

- If you're only using Paint:
You want to find a color between the eye color and the skin color (here, it's nice and easy, black and white), and literally fade the eyes from white, all the way down the grey scale to black. So that would be replacing the color pixels so they're a little darker, saving it. A little more, save it, until you reach black. Then, you just make those frames pretty fast, probably .1 second or maybe even .075.

- If you have access to a program like Photoshop, GIMP, Fireworks or Sketchbook Pro:
Pull the eyes out and save them on their own. Put the eyes on a layer above the rest of the doll, and slowly dim the transparency, saving every 20% or so. This will give you the desired effect. This is the technique I employed here, for the glasses fading. This is at a 20% step increment:
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b4...danimation.gif

I'm happy to help :) Hope this helps, too!

Haha, thank you! I was actually thinking about making that one my signature doll instead of the full version. xD

I was actually thinking about make it transparent as soon as I got done typing it. xDD I actually use GIMP for my dolls, since it's free and a very good program to use.

For some reason when I first tried making it transparent, I tried the blur effect with GIMP, since if used, it can fade away (very good technique if you want to get some cool effects). But no matter what I did, it just looked bad with the blur. xD I don't know why I didn't think of lowering the transparency in the frame itself until now. >__<

To make animations more fluently, you need to make more what animators call 'In between' keyframes. Which is basically: more keyframes. What I noticed in the animation with the devil tail is that you have three frames.
Which are: Tail left, Tail middle and Tail right. This is a good start, but these are the main keys.

What you should have is: Tail left, Tail left middle, Tail middle, Tail right middle and Tail right.
This will make it look more fluently, because you can actually see the movement the two frames I added are called the 'In betweens'.
I personally think that 5 keyframes are the least amount of frames an animation should have.

As for the eyes, add more frames as well and don't be afraid to use different colours or hue's if you want to make a blink animation. Colour is your friend for optical 'illusions' like blinking.

So, I actually made a blinking doll. It wasn't animated at first, but I quickly changed that earlier today.

http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/f/20...ra-d3esa7r.gif

Is that a bit better?

That looks great! It really works for you c: The blinks are still pretty frequent, but if the whole point is for the animation to be seen, better that it's too frequent than too rare!

I see what you mean. I changed the doll a bit, based on your comment. I knew it was frequent, but I was messing with it for so long trying to figure out what layers to put in, what the frame rate should be, etc etc. So I got impatient and saved it by that point. xDD

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/20...ra-d3esa7r.gif

It now has epic bouncing action, as you can tell! xDD

Perfect! I think you got everything just right there. You animate wonderfully; it's so cute!

Thank you so much! ^^ It took me awhile to figure out the timing, because the blink takes more frames to make smooth than the bounce (which only needs two frames xD). With the bounce + blink, I had to lower the frame speed from 400 (the regular bounce speed) to 200 and doubled the bounce animation. I played around with it for awhile and I think I'm comfortable with this. I saved the frames for the bounce + blink as an xcf file, just so I have a reference for at least the blink.

I couldn't have done it without everyone's help! Especially you, Anaxilea! <333 :D I'm really happy with this result.