Hello, I'm making sword animation sprites for a 2D game and I'm in doubt about the necessary number of frames for a given animation. In the sprite below, are there too many frames or is it good? If I remove some will the animation still look good? It's for a slash, 180º rotation of the sword. What do you think? Thanks in advance, Victor Freire

Your question is pretty ridiculous without knowing how fast the sword is being swung.

But, in general, animation starts to break down if you go under 12 frames a second. 24 is ideal.

You have 12 frames there, so if that swing takes a full second, it should look alright (glaring momentum issues aside). If it takes half a second, it should look very smooth.

You would probably be better of keeping one frame and then rotating the sword out. Maximum smoothness and all with one frame.

I'm inclined to agree with Barakus - no need to create separate frames of an item swinging if you aren't doing anything except manually rotating your sprite. Writing a rotation routine in your sprite engine (assuming it doesn't already have one) is much more efficient and allows for arbitrary rotation angles. If you want the "old-school" look, you can just limit the rotations you display.

With separately drawn frames the lighting can be consistent (e.g. from the upper right); with a mechanically rotated or mirrored sprite good lighting is impossible.

The current draft of the sword animation has a completely symmetrical diffuse lighing and the rotation looks worse than what would be rendered from the upright sprite with proper antialiasing, but at least the necessary infrastructure for tweaking good looking sprites is in place.

I'm less convinced that drawing a sword rotating 180° in isolation is useful; a character swinging it, as would appear in the final game, is needed to make a complete and meaningful animation.

I'm currently experimenting with the suggestion some gave about using just one sprite and rotating it. It looks pretty good.

I just read the interesting fact that LorenzoGatti pointed out about being able to do good lighting with the sword but as of now it seems too much work for me maybe later if I get a artist to help me out with the game I might do that.

Thanks everyone for the quick and helpful answers =D

Quote: Original post by LorenzoGatti
With separately drawn frames the lighting can be consistent (e.g. from the upper right); with a mechanically rotated or mirrored sprite good lighting is impossible.

This is true, but it's not what he was doing. :) I don't think I've seen sprite rotations used that way outside of top-down space games, where the lighting is very consistent because of the lack of atmosphere, a day/night cycle, and close-up lights. If your scenes get much more complicated than what you find in outer space, then you basically end up having to go full 3D anyway to get remotely accurate lighting.

Quote: Original post by Derakon

Quote: Original post by LorenzoGatti
With separately drawn frames the lighting can be consistent (e.g. from the upper right); with a mechanically rotated or mirrored sprite good lighting is impossible.

This is true, but it's not what he was doing. :) I don't think I've seen sprite rotations used that way outside of top-down space games, where the lighting is very consistent because of the lack of atmosphere, a day/night cycle, and close-up lights. If your scenes get much more complicated than what you find in outer space, then you basically end up having to go full 3D anyway to get remotely accurate lighting.

This is why well shaded sprites prerendered from full 3D source material are, or at least were, so popular.
Starcraft and Reiner Prokein's freely available graphics are popular examples; specific tools have been made for this kind of art production.