Setting-wise I'm animating at 30 frames per second. Traditionally you'd animate at 24 or 25 frames per second, but since the engine will be running at either 30 of 60 frames per second, this will make the transition into the actual game much smoother. I'm not using any particular resolution for these animations since the size of the stage will vary from motion to motion. I will say I start off with a 1280x720px stage, then work from there.
If there's any more traditional animators reading this, you should know that I'm running everything on 2's by default, but will definitely use 1's and longer exposures when the situation calls for it. Like for a particularly quick motion or a hold.
I'll be breaking up each character into mulitple files(.fla's). They will be "character_movement", "character_light", "character_heavy", "character_special" and "character_super". I'll also be putting every new animation/attack in a new scene within each of these files.
For the sake of these tutorials I'll be using John's f+H attack; a big hammer smash. Using the above paragraph as a guide, it means I'm using a file called "john_heavy.fla" and am working in the scene "f+H".
Everyone's workspace might vary, but here's the default workspace with John open.
I'm actually using a dual screen setup, so most of my panels are off screen, giving me more room to draw. Anyway, onto the animation crash course.
Now I was gonna make a big, long, continuous tutorial from here on out, but then I realised that some people may also be trained animators and might already know everything, or most of everything I'll be talking about. So instead of that I'm gonna break this into a new page for every new important termonology I need to cover. That way you don't have to trudge through crap you already know to find something useful to you. Here are the sections(they'll open in a new tab/window):
Keyframes
Inbetweening and Timing Charts
Breakdowns
Okay, since all that is hopefully covered now, all that's left is the process on exporting for inking/coloring.
COMING SOON