Hi everyone,

i'am not an artist and hope to find some inspirations from Professionals. I want to create a small Browserbased game, iam a Professional programmer since 7 years, so i actually know how to Programm a game, however it is a bit tricky for me to do the art.

The game is about ancient gladiators, it is more like a simulator rather than an action game, so you should be able to purchase gladiators from a slavery market, train them and watch them fighting in the arena. I hope i can find some help about the part "Watch them fighting". I want to create bone animations for different reasons. If i create a sprite animation then many images(or a big sprite) has to be downloaded by the browser to be able to display the animation. If i would create a 3D animation then the PC must have specific technical requirements and the details of the character would be not that good. So i decided to go for bone animations.

In order to create a commission request later on to an professional artist, i want to create the place holder images by my self. I think this is necessary for communication with the artist and also for me to develop the engine where i can replace the images later on.

My current test looked like this (please bare in mind that this is my 3rd picture ever ive drawn)



I want to create a pose, where i can create as much animations from it as possible without to redraw body parts. The game should have at least an animation for idle, attack, dodge, block, fall and die.
The reason why i want to avoid redrawing body parts is because of the armor parts, which should be replaceable, also the weapons.

My current pose has some problems, first one is the right leg, the pose feels correct but i dont have much freedom there, i have to redraw it then, maybe some here can show me a sketch/reference of a leg which will fit more for bone animation? The second problem is right arm.

as you can see here it is too short or if i move it in front of, it does not look like there were some damage input, it looks stiff.

i hope i can find here some pose inspirations for my need and i hope the question is not too offtopic, i just thought i can find here professional artists which already saw so many poses and help me out a bit.

Best regards

Qwop comes to my mind when I think of "bone tool" animation. Hopefully this inspires you in some way.

well i want to create an animation like this



but as you can see, on the attack animation the character turns his body, if i would add this, then every armor has to be drawn twice from different angle, i think lineart would be not that hard, but coloring, so instead of drawing two things i would like to prefer one universal pose

I always wanted to contribute to a game because i love gaming even if it´s minimal artwork, think it´s unnecessary to explain futher what the figure poses i depicted were doing and hope this ref is helpful to you. See the green cuts in your original figure? Those will provide fluent animatet movements as far as 2d goes. If you gonna go 3d u only need to create a chara in T-Position.

Looking forward to that gladiator game.

thank you very much, i will modify some parts in the next days and try to rig them again. i dont do it in 3D however i use Blender for rigging and animation which means i can rotate the images along the z-axis and also can deform images. Please take a look at the possibilities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUyOFZpM4Bs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-EDV9FX8ag

it is not only about a stiff 2d figure

i redraw the character, tried to fit better the proportions, added a sword,shield,helmet and shoulder pad, next thing will be the belt, boots and sleeves, then i can start with rigging and animation



since iam not an artist, iam not able to add colors right now, watched sycras video about values and try to setup values at least. not sure about the shadows at all since this character will be animated later on, i gues i would rather create a 3D shape around the character and then generate an ambient occlusion map with a 3D software and add the shadows during runtime

Ai what a nice progress i´m looking forward to see a further progress if you´d like to share it and support wherever i can.

Ai what a nice progress i´m looking forward to see a further progress if you´d like to share it and support wherever i can.

Thanks, i already started with rigging, will show later the idle animation. (Trau mich noch nicht die schatten einzubauen:D)

EDIT: btw i added the pants(i think they are not high enough)

http://blackscorp.github.io/threejs-tests/ animated the character, have to export the equipment and display it as well

It´s already looking supercool the animation. but has some issues that can be fix when you export clothes? Dunno...i´m not sure



You don´t need to change the lenght of the skirt i actually like men in miniskirt. Back to the topic

Shadows are less difficult if you have got an defined lightsource. Everything will more clear e.g. where the shadows falls because that system it pretty logical and thus nothing desribe forms better than light and shadow.

well the current problem is because that i start the animation for each part directly if the image is loaded, i have to wait till all images are loaded and then start the animation.

About the Shadows, it is not hard to define if you have one character, but i want to flip the character, because two gladiators have to fight each other, at this point, this will be a little bit harder. i suppose i have to create an ambient occlusion map and depth map and create the shadows during runtime.

like here http://www.snakehillgames.com/spritelamp/