uppa's sprite corner

[uppa]

welcome to uppa sprite corner. art by me.​

What is this thread for?

That's a great question, Pooh! I'm uppa, an animator for smogon's sprite project.
I make animations out of gen 5 style sprites that you can see in showdown!
I'm here to extend my reach to the forums and show off my work,
and to allow people to vote on what animations I make! :)​

Whoopee!!!!

Yes! ^_^ any other questions?

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You mentioned voting! How can I vote?

Every month or so, I will post a poll that will run for about a week.
Ten pokemon will be included in the poll, and the top three will be animated over the course of the month!
Pokemon not chosen in one poll will be recycled into the next poll, and I will take suggestions on what should be added!
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Thank you for answering my questions uppa!!!

You're welcome! Goodbye Pooh!!! but wait!!! before you go, here's every animation of mine so far. :)
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Gen 6

Gen 7

Gen 8

Gen 9

Some footnotes:
There are some conditions to requests! If a mon lacks a sprite or is already being worked on by another animator, I unfortunately can't animate it. Please keep this in mind, but I understand that the latter condition isn't public info, so here's a list of popular mons that I cannot animate for this reason:

mons i cant do (srry)

Kingambit
Koraidon
Iron Treads
Dondozo
Ceruledge
Meowscarada
Sneasler
Annihilape
Primarina
Rillaboom
Cinderace

​

 

[soupCD]

imagine there's an extra clodsire vote and thats me

 

[deetah]

I love this so much, what a nice way to include the community in such an important largescale project. You and the rest of the animators are so talented, thanks for all your hard work!

 

[uppa]

Poll 1 winners: Iron Valiant, Ting Lu, and Cinderace!


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Thanks everyone for voting! I'm glad this didn't flop entirely, and special thanks to those who didn't vote for NDM!

Progress is well underway, and I hope to update you all with finished animations on the first of March. Said post will also include Poll 2. In the meantime, feel free to suggest mons to be included in poll 2, preferably with a reason other than "My dad's favorite pokemon is Maschiff and it gets 6% usage in LC NU"

The current candidates for Poll 2 are:


Necrozma- Dusk Mane (4 votes)
Flutter Mane (4 votes)
Clodsire (4 votes)
Rillaboom (3 votes) (did not realize this was reserved)
Skeledirge (3 votes)
(more to be added for a total of 10)


The following Pokemon have been removed from Poll 2:

Enamorus- Incarnate (2 votes)
Enamorus- Therian (1 vote. sorry irpa <3)

​

 

[KRLW890]

Tatsugiri got animated, and its partner-in-crime Dondozo has pretty good performance in both singles and doubles. Would love to see it in poll 2 if it's not already reserved by another animator.

Thanks for all your hard work, your animations (and the rest of the Smogon animation team) look great!

 

[justnyxnow]

Tatsugiri got animated, and its partner-in-crime Dondozo has pretty good performance in both singles and doubles. Would love to see it in poll 2 if it's not already reserved by another animator.

Thanks for all your hard work, your animations (and the rest of the Smogon animation team) look great!

Dondozo taken by someone else and is close to be finished

 

[uppa]

first wave done!! poll 2 is now live

bigender robot

i had a lot of fun combining some of the elements of gardevoir's and gallade's animations! The little wave of the dress from gardevoir, and the squat(?) sort of motion from gallade. animating the glaive spin was really gratifying to make, hope you all enjoy!

moose

this is my third time animating a fat ground type, and its likely a fourth one will win the vote. i love bowl moose!!

NOTTT a bunny??!!!

i hadn't realized that cinderace and rillaboom were reserved, sorry all! please enjoy glimmet instead. it was fun making the most of literally two layers, i think i gave this bouncing baby boy a fitting motion. :]​

 

[grape tylenol]

that glimmet animation fucking rules

 

[uppa]

that glimmet animation fucking rules

thanks sonic

 

[DraconyxRising]

I'd Like to see animated versions of some of the backsprites, specifically for Necrozma Dusk mane if it gets picked and Hisu Lilligant. Hisu Lilligant doesnt have much reason for getting added on to but I like it. Another suggestion is Tapu Fini since it gets a TON of useage in Nat Dex Doubles.

 

[uppa]

thanks for ur patience!! here's wave 2. :3c

flutter mane

This one was really fun to do!! its been a while since i sprited hand-drawn cels as a key part of the animation, like for dhelmise and miraidon. I was really inspired by the animation featured in this video. I reached out to the artist at some point last year, and it turns out they actually worked on the sprite project way back in the gen 6 era!! thought that was cool, theres a lot of alumni i probably dont know about.

eight of them. :]

I chose to do magearna bc i made a lot of friends from the uubers community!! initially i had dismissed it as a tier played only by redditors from r/stunfisk, but since the hype died down the playerbase kinda distilled into a really skilled bunch. shoutouts to Finchely Bella LovelyLuna Imperial BigDaddyAddy Poosh_i OceanicGamer and probably a few i missed. and also sorry for the ping <3 I really love this mon and its place in the tier! whenever it's tested in ou it always outclasses itself with stored power cheese sets that get it banned, and isnt really able to shine as the cool utility mon it wants to be.

animating it was also fun! there was a point in the qc process where we collectively realized that magearna closes into the ball in a completely different way than it's depicted in my animation. I'd only looked at references in the 3d games where it only has a single in-between frame for going into its ball form. i'm still really happy with the end product though.

this one wasnt even on the poll like what are we doing here

recently me and a few animators were commissioned to animate sprites for a fangame!! this is the product of one such commission. i was having some serious art block while working on mega tyranitar, and wanted to go for something that really pushed me out of my comfort zone.

there is no pain like animating a spider without an inverse kinematic rig, nor is there pain like color correcting a palette of 100+ colors because I made the bubble head translucent in order to have a way of showing the silhouette of the legs behind the bubble without manually drawing them in for each frame. araquanid killed me to death, as demonstrated by my Very Good writing skills in this post, but it was a ton of fun working out all the problems it posed.

back sprite coming soon probs next month

---
its really a pleasure serving up animations for you all!! it always surprises me how much the community *doesnt* take our artists for granted, youre all too good to us lol. <3 poll 3 is now live, but i'd also like to mention that some of the mons animated will be influenced by the afformentioned fangame commissions (expect grimmsnarl next month), and ill be using the poll more loosely to just gauge what ppl want.

thanks again, till next month :3​

 

[uppa]

happy [month it isnt]!!!!!
wave :3 !!!

my bright son clodsire

he will go to a good college. clodsire is an immobile wad of gum in-game, so it was a bit hard translating his non-movement into an animation. i settled on something similar to what a lot of the little worm mons do where they sorta shuffle in place, like venipede. Spriting his little :D was fun, and its funny seeing how many people dont know about its spines!!

grimmsnarl

this one was a commission for a fangame!! lots of the official animations have this weird motion that can only be described as an onomatopoeic "bwoomp" and i've always strayed from replicating that look until now. i felt like it really fit grimmsnarl to sorta flex his hair muscles randomly and follow that path of motion. This doesn't happen in-game, but i also chose to have his hair writhe about in a similar way to hisuian zoroark, which certainly added something i think!!

tying up loose end's....

i did this for dragapult last year, but i decided to go back and animate goodra's backsprite since i put so much effort into its front sprite. shoutouts to the horribly compressed rip of it i found on tenor!! i figured it was one of the more iconic animations and deserved a bit more attention from me. araquanid was a total pain though!!! im so so proud of it but please never become a Spider Animator by trade! I used to randomly not animate the back sprites (see dracozolt, barraskewda, eternatus) but i'm trying to do them when i can nowadays. the gen 9 ones dont have backsprites yet, but i'll absolutely go back and animate those when they start rolling out.


expect an update to showdown's assets as well as a post in the sprite thread soon!! we'll have a few from our other animators as well as the twelve i've done over the past few months. also thank you all the sprite enjoyers and my cheerleaders on discord

also!!! there is only a finite amount of mons and i've already sniped all the high-usage ones i can, so its making less and less sense running a poll for who i'll animate. from now on, i'll just post every month or so with a new batch of critters!!! please take joy in the surprise!!!
​

 

[uppa]

tagging R8 for no particular reason ^-^ hellooo
wave 4

ephemeral art!!!

Wow uppa!! why did you animate a mon that likely will never appear in another main series game??? It was fun to animate and I like a challenge!!! The crystals rotating around terapagos are actually just two frames recolored 32 times to give the illusion of each of the 18 crystals moving on their own. I'm always really delighted when i can animate stuff without having to rotate it so that the sprite itself doesnt have any artifacts to draw over. you can see this in miraidon's animation, as well as many of Gamefreak's anims. Even if it realistically wont be seen much in showdown, i still had a lot of fun animating it!

eternatus?!

A few reasons I wanted to redo this one. Probably the most pressing issue for me was that my original eternatus animation is used in Pokerogue, and its some pretty old work that I'm not super proud of anymore! I'd contacted one of the devs (yes, that one) about if he might be interested in replacing it with the new version, and we had planned for it to be in an update before he left the project.
Second (much happier and joyfuler) reason is that I've been playing a lot of natdex ubers and BSS reg g, and eternatus is probably my favorite mon to pilot in both formats. Life orb 3a in natdex and cosmic power pp stall cheese in bss, both solo a lot of common team structures and it brings me a lot of joy. shoutouts to DerpySuX for being my cheerleader even though i suck at bss :catheart:

eighteen mice

tandemaus and maushold!! I think i chose to animate them because I was on a streak of bulky, floaty mons and wanted to do something snappier and more rhythmic like what I did for Iron Valiant. I've only done a few animations where the mon is literally dancing (see the tapus) and I felt that it was really fitting for these whimsical unserious mice. The babies reminded me of animating dragapult, fittingly, where I had to redraw each frame where they moved because their sprites got crunched up beyond recognition after being rotated.

doctors dont want you to know about this unreleased sprite

It's been a bit since I've been able to animate smoke or anything akin to it. Lots of flapping/wriggling animations like flutter mane, grimmsnarl, and terapagos, but I was itching to do something like you see in darkrai's animation. Gouging fire was a pain to redraw all the frames for, but i think the end result turned out pretty special, and I'm really happy with it. also, the little burning bulwark animation was fun to do as well, I like doing color change sequences like for Iron valiant and Stakataka. my enjoyment of a meta scales linearly with how many of my own animations i can stare at in-game, and i hope this alleviates my distaste for gen9ou somewhat!

oh also sprite update here later today. stay tuned.
<3​