So today I started to practice with character design and creating a simple animation using Photoshop. Inspired by Casiotone For The Painfully Alone music videos, I wanted to create a simple anthropomorphic character. It being my favourite animal, I wanted to use a cat creature as the protagonist. I started sketching freehand in PS with the brush tool and my Bamboo tablet. Once I refined the lines, I coloured it in.
Below is a screenshot of when I isolated the individual body parts to manipulate for the animatic. Each was on a different layer so that I could move them independently.
Using the Timeline window, I created a frame-by-frame animation using each layer as a frame. I played around with the frame rate and tweening of images to try to get the motion to run smoothly. You will notice in the final video I have not coloured in the full-body shot of the cat as I forgot to do so before rendering out. I experimented with different export settings when saving the piece. I found some file types took an age to render and used a large amount of memory; the below video was the first save I made that I was happy with the finished result. I believe I set the dimensions and aspect to the document size, and rendered through Adobe Media Encoder into MP4 at High Quality. It is still very simplistic but now that I have started experimenting, I am eager to start developing the length and detail of my pieces, as well as adding a soundtrack!
ETA: I have noticed that the above video is very low quality, and that you cannot view much of the details of the cat crying etc on the stark white background.
No comments:
Post a Comment