Crane Fighting Style
I’ve been looking into this fighting style for a reason, I know very little about it. Since my next battler I’m making uses it I needed to know certain things, it’s always important to know what you’re doing before you try to sprite it. The idle pose is the most obvious as it’s right there, but how do they defend? What is that styles primary attack? Those are just a couple of questions a person who makes things animate needs to ask themselves.
Try to look up videos on the style itself, not just someone practising but also combat videos. These may even be from games where a certain character uses that style.
From what I’ve gathered by doing a days studying (Hey c’mon it’s new years day) is that a lunge forward – whilst lowering the right leg- then the left hand flows forward into a strike. Taking note that the other hand does a circular motion – seemingly to push away a targets block.
If it helps try to sketch out a few drawings to help with balance, start and end stances.
When you come to actually animate the character don’t make it picture perfect first time, why? Well you’re not going to know if it works until you’ve seen it in motion. Additionally with this sheet there’s only 4 frames to play with, 2 of those being the move to impact and the impact.
Now this is a first draft of the attack pose, I’m not worried about what the body is doing at this point as the main focus is on getting that leg to the ground and keeping the actors balance. The red circle is the attacking hand, it’s within 16 pixels of the impact zone (the first 32 pixel zone) so the lunge isn’t going to be that far.
Now if I find that I need an additional frame at the end, after the impact pose then I’ve not wasted any time. Making sure that frames can be removed and the actor still appears to be moving into position (it may look a bit faster) is a big relief knowing that there’s flexibility to work with. Here’s how it looks with just the Idle pose and the first Attack frame:
I think that works really well, if anything it shows that this character is really fast. The only alterations which may be needed is on the hand that’ll push away the targets block, it might need to be animated in earlier and not start so close to the body.
A Fencer not a Fighter
Anyway there’s not been a whole load happening, I’ve been able to complete the idle pose of Fighter 002 from XP:
Though I see her more of a fencer and since XP doesn’t really separate that sort of class I’ll be categorising her as a fencer.
I’ve also noticed that there’s been quite a few people checking out the Scripts sections, I know I’ve not been able to update those as much as I would’ve liked. I’m hoping in the future to have a few example videos up for each script, so if you have or know of any please let me know 
~Stay safe
Why am I doing this? Well my wife (Mrs.H as I usually mention her as) has this and it’s in a really severe state to where no treatment works, there is no cure and I feel that by doing this and helping to raise money for the NACC, more research can be done, to get more awareness of this out there and support everyone with this.
Until there is or if there isn’t going to be one I’ll post them here. There’s two for RMXP and two for RMVX (that can also be used with RMVXAce)
