Interprite - sprite interpolation software to create more frames

[bWWd]

Im posting here cause i didnt want to hijack other topic and it deserves its own, if You decide to use that tool please share your results, im very curious.
I found very interesting software for interpolation ,its called intersprite, and i got really decent result with robo
Here is 20 frames, one extra interpolated frame inbetween

Great thing about it is that it can create even 10 interpolated frames, here i created 3 frames so its 40 frames of animation, original had 10

Original 10 frames animation next to 40 frames version:

So if i wer You guys i would use that instead of video interpolation.
Here is tutorial for that:

Its quite long but basically you have layers on side which tell what body part is behind what etc, you can rename them above tools, so you paint over body parts highlighting them, once you do all frames painted then you add bones , its that tool next to eraser. And when you finish applying bones then now you can interpolate, it wont interpolate without bones .
Id leave morphs disabled.Also when painting body part just paint entire bodypart shape like it really is when its obscured by something in front of it then dont stop paintng , this way you will get very usable animation.
In case of a problem i can upload this robo project fo you to see.
One more test i did with ermac, interpolated to 40 frames

IMO results are very promising , it takes time to separat and paint limbs tho, and i hope there will be some sort of stabilisation

 

[kimono]

Thank you bWWd, the sprite animation is excellent. I will make some tests and will show the result ingame

 

[bWWd]

I did this as a joke experiment but result is ridiculous, its like magic .Next to original animation.

 

[kimono]

A Moonstone remake with this kind of animation is almost mandatory, amazing
Great intro, great game and a great ending, an excellent game at all points :

 

[oldyz]

@ bWWd

fantastic find, the bones thing seems to really pay off well.

 

[danno]

4 frames

8 frames


This program is amazing, great find bWWd, i'll post more later.

 

[bWWd]

Great ! Go above 10 then it will be smooth emough, knight 12 and 8

Kimono i already made moonstone version of my own, ill change all walking animations to new ones with more frames.
After small retouching , 12 and 8 fps

I tried this one as well, 12 and 8 , and 44
 

   

 

[danno]

I'd like to see a video of your work process using this program bWWd,

 

[bWWd]

allright, what anim?
btw this was made using DAIN but i cant use it i dont have nvidia gpu with CUDA ,its automated process without any manual drawing

 

[danno]

any anim, grabbed DAIN and made these, this interpolation thing is crazy
32 frames from 4

 

[bWWd]

Great ! I would try to scale sprites up to 400 % and then run DAIN , then scale down 25% to normal size with nearest neighbour, this way you will remove antialiasing.
Even 200% would improve it

 

[O Ilusionista]

Dain is an amazing tool, too bad I can't run in on my computer. But I will give a try with the other one

And yeah, scaling sprites first should give you better results

 

[danno]

I tried some street fighter 2 HD sprites but my computer crashed  ;D a bit of cleaning has to be done after up/down scaling but still worth, this will definitely come in handy when I start drawing my own characters.

 

[bWWd]

Great, i interpolated battletoads nes run, it was a lot of cleaning, i think lower res sprites need more cleaning than higher res because one pixel takes much more of the actual character.Original, interprite export and cleaned up.Its strange cause you can barely tell a difference between last two and it was a lot of work  ;D

I noticed that a lot of craziness from original animation goes away with more frames, so thats one downside.
By the way how fast is DAIN on your pc ? Is it superslow and takes up resources ? IVE seen SF HD spiters after dain treatment .
Oh, would You be able to run that low framecount original battletoad running anim upscaled 4x through dain ? Id like to compare automatic vs manual interpolation like i did with bones and cleanup.
PLease post original pngs if you can zipped.
This one:

 

[danno]

I did 3 renders x2 x4 x8 of the original, took me about 5 minutes, DAIN uses 100% gpu and you can't use the pc for much else while its rendering

you're really good at cleaning up the sprites (thats why I wanna see your work process) and In my opinion using manual is better if you have the skill set


If you want anymore let me know

https://www.sendspace.com/file/lp6x55

 

[bWWd]

Oh, that just made me realise it was worht it, i suspected that thats why i wanted to see result, theres just not enough information between 2 frames and AI does not know whats hand and leg and were it ends, where chest begins and what movement is performed.Maybe in the future...
Irecorded progress of battletoad run but i didnt record cleanup process, and what i recorded is 1 fps.So not that smooth, i dont know what i was thinking, it wasnt drawing timelapse  : well kinda was but animation playback is not visible.
Here it is
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TWhPNw1d6zorwQwG34Y3MsIRgX5Q-iAS/view?usp=sharing
I worked on limbs one by one , first paint then bone , one by one, i start from the ones that are in front of everything else like foot first, or elbow/hand.But i can change order of display later anyway.
So several times im adjustng bones after seeing interpolated result, sometimes i try multiple different bones positions to get less distortion on sprites or make them move like i want them to.
- 4 frames i interpolate with 2, and if there are more frames then i go with 1 interpolation.
- Overlap joints when painting over limbs, so there are no empty holes between them when rotating and animating.If needed take bits away when there is too much.
- Basically im after anything that would give me more than 10 frames export but less than 20 frames at the end.Sometimes even 8 frames from 4 is enough, it depends what youre after but 4 is definitely not enough.
- IF you dont want something to be rotated at all like head in this example then just place bones on every frame on the same exact pixels .It wont distort and wont rotate it.
- Also You have different methods like morphing and blending, those are separate, blending means it would try to blend the end and beginning of each separate limb, but morphing is something different, it kinda morphs from one image to other in  a weird way.
- Sometimes it helps to just set body/stomach or chest area to morph when theres a hand obscuring it during animation, it would remove leftovers better than other methods from what i tested but for others i use no morph, just blend mildly or no blend on master.
-  I almost never do just one method for everything.
- Limbs like legs and arms i do with brief or mid blend, or no blend, and head, usueally i dont even rotate it cause its important to leave it without artifacts, body i usually go with morphing complex, advanced morphing sometimes leaves strange kinda semitransparent artifacts with transparency color of the frame might be a bug.
I think thats kinda if of how i figured this out, first examples were worse, now its getting better.

 

[danno]

wow you did quite a lot of cleaning, great work, I think the A.I in DAIN will Improve over time and the over all result is cleaner than manual (smoothness) but the end result in bodily movement of the animation is whats important and DAIN fails at that, resolution is a factor too, If you were to clean up DAIN sprites that would be interesting because of how fast the amount of frames it can pump out. I'll use a mix of the 2, sprite quantity = DAIN sprite quality = Manual. I did one of your HEMAN idle stances and it was 160 frames per second 

 

[bWWd]

PLease share yout experiments with it so we can see its strong points and weakness.
I tried to do something witth that dain toad run but after opening it in aseprite i gave up, it did almost nothing, just blurred from one frame to other.
found dain sf hd, but those stances are easy or, pixels are harder to figure out than hd res artwork

 

[danno]

try this one, I limited the pallet colours so There should be no blur



here's your Heman
original






I tried some sf hd sprites but it crashes every time.

 

[bWWd]

That heman looks very good, but  probably cause framerate was higher, toad has only few frames and motion is harder to predict.But dain is great cause it wont introduce overall blurring, just kind of motion blur on fast movement on particular elements.