My Best Models for Pixel Art Character Walk Cycle Animation Generation

I tried out Seedance 1 Pro for Sprite Animation for Walk Cycle Generation. You can try this model out using Scenario (paid).

Base Image:

Prompt: Walk Cycle for Pixellated NPC character sprite walking towards right for Machi game.

This seems rather promising. The anatomy and style is preserved near perfectly. It does produce kinda puppet-wrapped pixel art animation.

Prompt: Run Cycle for Pixellated NPC character sprite running towards right for Machi game.

The latency on the generation was pretty fast too.

Also tried Google Veo 2 Fast and Veo 3 Fast and Quality model for comparison.

You can run those model through Scenario (paid) or Flow (paid).

Prompt: Walk Cycle for Pixellated NPC character sprite walking towards right for Machi game. Camera Fixed.

Veo 2 Fast:

It is anecdotal but the movement is too stiff.

Veo 3 Fast looks better, and it provides sounds too.

Gif Version:

Veo 3 Quality:

Veo 3 Quality version seemed to give out similar quality as the Veo 3 Fast when it comes to pixel art animation. Didn’t see too much of noticeable differences in my tests.

---

Analysis

All models—Seedance 1 Pro, Veo 2 Fast, Veo 3 Fast, Veo 3 Quality—was able to generate walk cycles with a good attention to detail. However there were qualitative differences.

To me, the Veo 2 is looks way too robotic. The character does not even bend its elbo.

Veo 3 sometimes bend its elbo slightly, but the rest of the body is rather stiff.

Seedance 1 Pro was most natural of all. It fluidly moves the character.

---

Possible Future Investigations

• Detailed Prompt: Prompts we used here is lacks details. It may be helpful to guide the model through providing more subtle details like how the hand should move etc.

---

What does it mean for SpriteDX project?

I think we can use these models for generating sprite animation. Once SpriteDX generates sprites for characters and enemies, we can use it to generate full animated versions.

Thanks for reading.

—Sprited Dev 🧚