Hello again to all of you. How've you been doing? How've
I been doing? I've been busy over in CAP with Cawmodore's sprite/animation, but I've gotten myself the time to make Mega Aggron sprites as well. Those sprites were up on the spreadsheet quite a few days ago. o3o If you need help with the back sprite's pose and tail, they'll be there (until their potential replacing).
I'm very glad that aXl and TeraVolt are helping with unfinished Mega Evolutions! I will reiterate: no sprites at all are far less appealing than 'wow, that's pretty good but not perfect' sprites. What's even more wasteful is having multiple, talented spriters all trying to refine a sprite under their own impressions of perfection. I "get" this, but make sure that you and other spriters "get" it as well! There is no need to make a completely new sprite if there is merely minor QC required of an original.
Now, let me mention animations. Foremost, If you think that a sprite will be edited in the future--by checking the spreadsheet, ahem--please don't invest the time yet. If this sprite you're animating has been approved by Layell and Wyverii, then you've got a go-ahead, though be aware that other people may continue to QC/replace the sprite regardless of animation approval.
Let's say you've gotten to the point where you've made a set of sprite animations. The first criterion to check is that it fits Gen. V's style. Our Gen. VI sprites are intended to remain consistent with Gen. V sprites, which includes animation quality. In almost any other setting, bicubic rotations and non-anti-aliased transformations would be a poor choice, compared to frame-by-frame drawing, for animation. However, that is exactly the style of Gen. V sprites! Jagged pixel outlines on animated frames are what we want! There is, remarkably, a thing such as 'too good' for animations--and this is why, unfortunately,
ekurepu's/eclep's smooth animations will not be implemented.
I see many animations here that are animated in short 'pulses' rather than with moving segments in each frame. Granted, some in-game sprites' animations are jerkier than usual, but if you take a GIF of a random Gen. V sprite, please note how many unique frames are used for each normal idle loop. I prefer an average of ten frames, animated at 0.13 SPF (seconds per frame)--twenty for 'rare' animations. If your animation has fewer than that many frames or more than that many SPF, try tweening in some frames and/or adjusting the SPF accordingly and compare that to the rate of animation of in-game sprites.
Pokecheck has a wonderful database, if you need to mass-compare animations. Some GIFs on PS! are animated too quickly or slowly, so they are not completely reliable as reference.