Help with my animating skillz?

[Pivot Boom]

not bad huh?

nope, i take it back, i suck! thats why i came here.

[Waffles Mgee]

Tests! Always start off with tests if you're wanting to go down the road of improvement. A walk loop, a run loop, a single jump, a punch, a kick, just small, simple animations dedicated to one particular movement. If you snoop through the tutorial section you'll find threads to help you with the basics if you need help getting started.

[tuna]

Tests! Always start off with tests if you're wanting to go down the road of improvement. A walk loop, a run loop, a single jump, a punch, a kick, just small, simple animations dedicated to one particular movement. If you snoop through the tutorial section you'll find threads to help you with the basics if you need help getting started.

i really really disagree. the best way of learning is to do it all in practise. if you just practise a punch animation, thats all well and good until you have to find a place to put in a long animation, how is it going to flow into the other moves, before and after, and how are other people/objects going to react, and what angle would it be from etc etc. the best way is definitely to practise with long animations. short animations make you lazy, it's a trap many animators have fallen into. if you're practising to make long story animations, then the best way you can learn how to do that is to make them.

tl;dr: you can learn s an instrument by learning all the scales but that doesn't make you a good musician. same with animating.

[SIFTER]

Actually, it's not half bad for a beginner, in my opinion. What i really like about your animation is that you never let the origin point stop from moving which is something that a considerable number of beginners don't. At the run loop, you also took into consideration that whenever you're going up, the torso goes up as well, so the upper body's movements do relate to the lower body, your movements also look more clean than some beginners out there which makes you half way to get intermediate! Although, that doesn't mean that your animation DOES look good. It only does in comparison to some beginners, as I said.

You see, you still have some stiffness here and there because of not moving every single segment each frame. In example: When kicking, not only the arms become static, some other parts of the body also don't seem to move at all such as the torso. Sometimes the whole upper body. Or when you made your guy do that big jump where you can't see the ground anymore. I understand you're not moving them mainly because you believe that body doesn't necessarily move at certain moments or you're simply too lazy to move it all. if I were to blindly guess, I'l go for the first option. If that's the case, your belief is wrong. For example, when you see some one jumps, your own eyes might notice that the body doesn't really move while being in mid-air. Actually, that's just you who can't see some tiny movements in-between. Next time you animate, never let any single dot you see on your screen without being moved before you press the [add frame] button. This will allow your animation to look a lot better. The next thing i want to talk about is your poses, they are looking kinda decent, but they surely have a lot of room for improvement, you see regardless of how decent it is, you lack that natural feeling intermediate+ animations have. The secret behind having natural looking poses is to make them look relaxing and, well, natural. Not cartoonish, and I repeat, not cartoonish. A lot of beginners seem to have this problem with poses where they make them look too cartoonish to the point where they'd make their poses so stiff and non-relaxing. Of course, cartoonish style is not wrong since it can look pretty appealing. Just try not to over exaggerate.

As a beginner, it is very normal to have this sort of flaws that I'll be mentioning now, and fixing some of them is not very tough. After the kick that came after the big jump, there was some shakiness in the upper body because of inconsistency in your spacing and motion path. These two images will explain to you how shakiness and spacing's consistency work and how can shakiness be fixed.

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

And when you animate a jump, you should always consider to wind up before you shoot your character to the air. in other words, you need to build up momentum. You usually do that by swinging the arm backwards then forwards while extending the whole body at the first frame of the actual jump, if it makes any sense to you. That added to your lack of good foot placement. You can just look up tutorials to learn about all the basics that you lack. But I'll give you this tip for foot placement: Always keep the feet parallel to the ground.

As I said, you're decent for a beginner, so just keep on animating and you'll naturally improve, eventually.