a guy who did a thing probably

so first of all I fill an image with the types of sprite I'll need:

for some characters, like rose, sprite sheets are just available online pre-ripped and laid out on places like deviantArt, and I can just copy what I need from there.

however, I often use a lot of characters from new homestuck, for whom sprite sheets have not been ripped. this is when i would use edits: harry and tavvy’s legs are usually edited dave legs, yiffy’s legs are modified from johns original sprite.

often edits won’t do though, so i’d end up drawing things from scratch; nowadays i prefer to do this with any character’s *arms*, since it’s easier to do this than try to squish in ripped arms where they don’t fit (though this harry anderson example is mostly ripped and edited, since I didn't use many new arms for this). A lot of Vrissy sprites that aren’t basically her default pose are usually redraws, since her skirt isn’t a recolour of any older sprite afaik.

to make sure i have everything i need i’ll usually try to draft out the pose, but it’s not too important; i can always edit the image in texture paint later.

2. import into blender

i import the sprite sheet into blender as an Image As Plane; this used to be an add-on but now i think it’s a native feature.

this’ll be a principled shader by default, so what i’d do next is go to shaders and change this; i use a mix shader that picks between the straight image colour and a transparent shader based on the alpha channel. you’ll want to set the interpolation to Constant instead of Linear to make it less blurry, since the resolution of the texture is deliberately very small.

you’ll also want to avoid having an alpha channel value that isn’t 0 or 1 unless you have a deliberate reason and know what you’re doing. there are uses for transparency in layering, but it’s can be confusing for beginners for a variety of reasons, especially when working with the gif format.

3. prepare for animation

firstly, cut out the distinct pieces from the plane with the knife tool. arrange the distinct pieces in their correct layers

i’ll either separate out these into separate objects or animate them with shape keys;

As a rule of thumb, I find shape keys more suitable for minor or fully translational motions, and would only seperate something into a seperate layer if it's movement involves a significant rotational component.

relatedly, i would recommend using the knife tool or loop cuts to make certain areas deform the way you want: i typically give myself cuts to accommodate hair wiggle and bending knees at least.

4. animate

animation, for me, is largely a process of intuition, so this stage is hard to explain

i am certain that there are more rigorous, technical ways to learn animation principles at an art college or something, but must of what i know comes either from cultural osmosis around animation principles (ie the “12 principles”) or from practicing over time.

general tips would be:

- look at animation you like or clips of real life motion frame by frame. note that actually animating frame by frame isn’t what blender is best at, you’d be looking at these references so you can get an idea of how to *interpolate* the motion.

- speaking of interpolation, blender has many preset animation curve types you can access by left clicking in the timeline. these cover a solid chunk of the types of motion you’ll want, though i’d still recommend using the customisable default curves with handles for certain motions.

- shape keys are great for layered and secondary motion, and you may also benefit from expanding their range out to -1 and 2 for compelling settling motion.

- you can parent a separate object to 1 vertex in another to mimic that vertex’s transformation, or 3 to have the object rotate and scale. if there are dramatic body movements i’d recommend keeping arms attached like this, either to the geometry or to a free floating vertex that moves with the shape keys

- if you need more sprites than you put on your sprite sheet, you can add them in texture paint. to match the crisp pixels typical of homestuck’s art style, you’ll want to set turn anti-aliasing off in advanced brush options and set the falloff to constant.

- generally use an orthographic camera pointing parallel to an axis, it makes things easier to keep track of

- you may want a geometry nodes setup to control arm or torso swapping if there’s a lot of it, especially of you’re working with motion blur on, since this is one of the few methods that won’t break motion blur. if you’re not using motion blur, you can just move things off camera

5. render

if you’ve modified the image in texture paint since importing, remember to save it or it will revert! it doesn’t save when your document does.

to keep hard pixels, set render samples to 1. By default, view colour management will be set to AGX, which messes with your colours; you can change this to Standard to preserve them. some versions will also have look set to Filmic, which also messes with your colours.

i’d recommend exporting as frames then making those into a gif with ezgif. there are add-ons that let you render gifs as gifs, but ezgif gives you greater control.

one last note: if you’re making gifs like these for use on discord, don’t compress them too much; discord will compress them *again*, and that can make your gif buggy.

once rendered, voila! today we have 3 little monkeys jumping on the bed.