|  |  |  | Axis adjustment |  |  |  |

Axis placement is something crucial when creating a character. Well placed axis will give your character a solid, "professional" look. Bad placed axis will cause strange misplacing in animations, giving your character a very poor appearance. Don't forget that the first impresion we get ffrom a characters com from its looks, and that the first impresions are the ones which last more, so we need to take care of this subject. Now, what do we do to adjust the axis?. Something we must avoid at all costs is adjusting the axis manually. There are sprite editing programs for Mugen which allow you to place the axis with the mouse what, although is sometimes useful, we should do our best to avoid. Have you ever tested a new character, and when you saw it walking you thought: "what a strange way of walking, this shouldn't move this way" and when executed a punch or kick the move appears lightly (or not so lightly) shifted to one side or another? This is because the sprites' axis were manually adjusted.

Examples of problems caused by manual axis placing: 1- "Strange" animations which cause a bad effect. 2- Steep transitions between animations (in the example, between the standing pose and the punch).

The general idea is adjust manually only when absolutely necessary. Then, what other methods are there to correctly adjust the axis? There is one, adjusting the axis in relation to a "master" or "reference" sprite. The better reference sprites are the first frame in the standing animation and crouching, because any move, before or after being executed, returns to these animations, so we can always compare them. In order to adjust the axis with this technique follow these steps:

- Before anything else, we need to create the reference sprite. To do so first we'll assign an axis to the standing animation. We'll have no choice but to do this manually, of course. By a general rule, the axis in this animation whould be placed at feet heigh, and horizontally around the middle of the character. If you followed the sprite extraction techniques section's instructions, the axis will be the same for every sprite in the animation. Now test the character (a good idea if we have done nothing else is get the SFF of KFM, the character that comes with Mugen and, using some program like MCM overwrite its standing sprites with yours, then run KFM) and observe how the animation looks against its shadow. If the character's feet (or whatever he stands on ;) and the shadow's are too close or don't touch, that means that the axis' "y" component isn't well placed, and you'll have to reposition it. Once we're happy with the result we'll make a copy of the first frame, mark the axis with a point or a cross in an intense color that stands out from the rest, and save it with a descriptive name, like "Ref_Standing.pcx" or something in that fashion. Now we have a reference sprite, ain't that great? ;)
- Now, when ripping an animation, we'll take a screenshot of every sprite (counting and writing down the # of ticks between frame and frame to be later translated into the animation .AIR file) and, once the animation is completely ripped, without moving the character, we'll take a shot of the first frame in the standing animation which comes after (we'll call this the "extra" sprite). If it's an airborne animation we'll take this shot before jumping or just after landing.
- Prepare very sprite, "extra" included: crop them to the same size, apply the appropiate palette (not needed with the "extra" sprite), etc...
- Now, paste the reference sprite on the extra sprite, with transparency, and make them overlap (they should overlap perfectly). Look at the cross which marked the axis in the reference frame, and write down its coordinates once pasted. These are the axis coordinates for the entire animation. If the animation took place in the air, only the "x" component will be valid, and we'll have to manually assign an "y" one, trying different values until transitions between the animation and the ones before and after it (for example, if we're ripping an aerial kick, between the jumping and kicking animations) is smooth.

Let's follow the process with an example to make it clearer:

First we'll create the refernce sprite: to do it we'll take the first sprite of the standing animation and manually assign an axis for it (at feet height and horizontally more or less centered in the character), then test it until the character and its shadow look natural. Mark the axis with a cross in the sprite and save it with a descriptive name.

Then, in order to rip an animation, first we'll take screenshots of every frame in the animation, in this example a punch, and besides we'll take as an "extra" a shot of the first sprite of the standing animation which comes after it. Crop them all to the same size and reduce them to 256 colors applying them the corresponding palette.

Now paste the reference frame in the "extra" sprite with transparency, and move it until they overlap perfectly. Finally, write down the coordinates of the cross which marked the axis, which will be the ones we'll assign to every sprite in the animation when building the SFF (see next section). We can now delete the "extra" sprite.