What is the name of the animation technique with circles...

What on earth is the name of the sprite animation technique where you use connected circles in order to create animation? It is frequenly used on the SNES to give the illusion of 3d. I used to know this and it's driving me nuts...

Does it even have a name? I think it was just a result of wanting to anime things without creating complete sprites for every frame. Its not just circles, look at a bunch of the 2d Gundam fighting games and the Fire Pro Wrestling series. They use this style to animate the entire body. Not exactly to create depth, but its the same thing.

*edit* How could I forget to mention BALLZ.

*edit edit* VECTORMAN

Kinetic concentric cloning. Kincentroning.

I'm pretty sure it has a name. Like Mode 7, it was a bullet point item when I was younger. YOu are right that they don't have to be circlues, but they most usually were because it helped sell the idea that it was one mass.

The main difference, I think, is that it was animated with math as opposed to be being animated by hand, which allowed for smoother animation.

Ask Paul Robertson.

I'm not sure it has a name, but I've seen similar things used for ropes and curving lasers. An example from Raiden Fighters:

As an aside, Contra 3 is great.

It's basically a form of rudimentary skeletal animation. They just used circles back in the day because squares would have looked weird.

Yeah, completley. It's a procedural animationt technique in that it doesn't animate objects by hand. I reallk thought someone would know by now.

I'd call it a "compound sprite" or "compound object". It's just a sprite (or object) made up of more than one sprite (or object.)

I Googled it, and there's some precedent for this name.