Can We Fix Crush Crawfish's Animation?

So this seems to be a natural progression of fixing the animation of a boss character I found to be broken from an old 1995 SNES game.

#MegaManX3 #VideoGameAnimation

⌂ CHAPTERS ⌂
0:00 - 0:53 Introduction
0:54 - 1:14 Set Up
1:15 - 3:00 Boss Room Entrance
3:01 - 4:18 Dash Attack
4:19 - 5:19 Diagonal Claw Grab
5:20 - 5:44 Horizontal Claw Grab
5:45 - 6:33 Projectile Shoot
6:34 - 7:02 Back Dash
7:03 - 7:39 Comparison
7:40 - 9:20 Re-Animate from scratch
9:21 - 9:40 Outro

☆ RESOURCE ☆
▶︎ Footage:

◁ Audio:
YouTube Royalty Free Library

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[ShinDMitsuki]

What's really nice about the fixed version is, it demonstrates what could have been done under similar time and budget and performance constraints on an actual snes. It's MASSIVELY improved, but not by doing 10 times more work. Good job.

[NestorCustodio]

My cousin's giant robotic shrimp dashes along the ground and then comes to a *very abrupt* stop, but you do you, I guess. 🤔

[baddabaddabaddaswing]

That correction in the order of frames for the falling entrance makes me seriously consider that was the intention and it was an error in production and wasn't caught until the game shipped. There doesn't seem to be any other reason for it existing the way it does originally.

[SCHenry]

You know what would be a fantastic entrance:

He enters the arena by breaking the window in the background. Like you see a silhouette of him breaking the glass, he breaks it, and the whole arena is flooded.

[toastypumpkin]

Man, just re-organizing the frames that were already there and changing the timing alone was already such a massive improvement. It's wild.

[diariodeumdesenvolvedor]

That entrance looked so good that it really made me think it was supposed to be this way since the beginning, but something happened along the way.

[DeflyCK]

The entrance feels like some Coding bug, where the falling animation doesnt play in the right time, only when he lands on the floor

[ScoutOW]

I actually love this idea as a video series. Although some constructive criticism, the rotation is better and smoother animation. But it kinda doesnt feel like low pixel animation. It feels more like those Death Battle-esk animations. I personally woulda rotated in a pixel based program like aseprite so you dont get angled sprites but recalculated pixels. Usually, in games that do rotate limbs with pixel art, the entire art style revolves around that, usually not with 8-bit where it's a looot more noticeable.

[ShinoSarna]

9:18 Also something to consider is that in actual pixel art animation, you usually have the maximum resolution of 1 pixel change, which can make tiny offsets difficult. There is subpixel animation (basically moving colors of pixels rather than actually moving pixels themselves), but it requires a lot of work done on every single frame to get subtle timing right.

[rorbee]

Your original animation looked incredible! One thing that'll keep bothering me about mr shrimp is that he looks vacant like there's not a thought behind those completely still eyes.

Made me really happy to see how simple changes made the original animations look much more alive. Love this style of "animation renovation" video!

[gerpity]

wow, i would love to see where this new format could end up taking you, it could even help me realize, exactly why it is, that some animations look so bad

when i saw your fixed animations, even with small explanations, it really helped me realize "wow, so that's why the original looked so wrong" after knowing how they could have looked, even for doing almost the exact same things

love seeing all the stuff you talk about, keep it up!

[Tomatoes]

I like this style of video. Using the green screen segment to show how something with evenly paced falling looks strange singlehandedly sold me on the green screen inclusion.

[rimjobledouche]

Excellent work!

Back in '96, the games' animation was a sticking point for me. Minakuchi Engineering did a decent job with X3, but their lack of polish was apparent even then.

Your fixes were astounding. Even before your Final re-animation of Crawfish's intro, your tweaks to his various poses and attacks gave him a weightier feel.

What I love most about your approach is that you only used what was available in X3 itself. and added nothing that the SNES couldn't do.

[Nix-Man]

Great job on the video! That fresh intro animation at the end was so cool. Mmx3 is my bae of the franchise. Scuffs and all, i love it to bits

[fubu]

Wow this is super neat both as a follow up and a thing on its own. You rarely see this kind of hands on work on such videos, they're usually more "should do this, shouldn't do that, doesn't look good, could look better, etc". Well done

Edit: ohh the puppeteering at the end is also really neat. They're really the kind of movements that make characters memorable

[maxuwl]

This is genuinely a great to teach animation even with a limited number of draw sprites
I would love to see more this man

[deniskdenisk]

I don't do any animations and probably will never do, but seeing your thought process and observations, along with the incremental tweaks and an awesome result has been a great delight. You're a true master of your trade sir.

[firytwig]

I love this video and concept. It’s so cool how you managed to make it look so much nicer with smart use of the already existing frames.

[ErukanuSenpai]

Had this in my recommended, and funnily enough, it's just 10 minutes old.

Awesome job, would love to see more of that !

[Jarrbitt]

I really love the format of the past couple videos. Much more organized than the first attempt as well as being more personable than your previous videos. Really great work! I love seeing you reanimate sprites too. The small touches add so much!