| Hey there suckas and
suckettes, so here I am again with an an animation tutorial.
I don't really know what to write about so I'm just going
to animate one of the sprites I did for a sprite
jam. So let me just go get something to drink and I'll
start as soon as I can. By the way, I'm using Adobe ImageReady
because I like too and it's a nice little program. |
| Here he is, Phinneas
Gage, a railroad worker back in the day. He was blasting a
mountain for laying down track
for western railroad expansion when accidentally a rod got
shot through his head and brain. He didn't die. He didn't
even really feel pain. He got up and walked to the on site
doctor and lived for many years after.
What I think
I'm going to do is have his right hand go up and pull the
rod out of his face.
Friendly
Reminder:
TURN OFF ANTIALIASING! |
|
First thing
I'm going to do is seperate the layers. I select the background
colour and then hit CTRL + SHIFT + I, and that selects the
inverse, so instead of the background, I now have Phinneas
selected.
Then I hit
CTRL + SHIFT + J, this takes the selection and makes a new
layer from it and removes the image from the previous layer.
This will also leave a transparent shadow on the coloured
background. Just flood fill that in and move on. |
Now we are ready to start
animating. The real animation starts in your head. Think
about the animation. What does it look like for an arm to
rise up? Do it yourself. What usually happens to the arm
is the hand leads the action. You move your hand first and
then move your upper arm, you don't just stick your arm
straight out and then bend it.
Knowing how we want the
arm to move in our head, we can now transfer it to the image.
I'm planning on four or five frames of animation for the
arm lifting up and moving to the bar.
"FOUR OR FIVE?!
I HAVE TROUBLE DRAWING TWO!"
I know I know, it sounds
like a lot but don't worry. There's a little trick you can
do that not everyone knows about...
|
| Keyframes!
A keyframe helps a whole
lot when drawing animation. Keyframes define the extremes
in an animation and then you draw the frames between these
extremes, called the inbetweens. Let me teach through example. |
|
Using seperate layers for
each frame of animation and quick stick drawings, I'm going
to draw the 2 extremes.
The blue line
is his arm at rest, and the yellow line is his arm holding
the bar. So now we have the two extremes of his arm. Now,
using this guide we can easily see the middle position. Remember
how the arm moves, move the upper arm a little bit and the
lower arm and hand more. |
| 
There we go, the middle
position. The little curl is just to hint to me the position
of the hand. Now, I'm just going to make a quick gif of it
and see how it looks.
Looking good
so far. So now that we have the two extremes and a middle
position, we can easily see the inbetween of extreme one,
his hand down, and the middle position. So let's draw that.
|
| 
And then do the same thing
for the inbetween from the middle position and the second
extreme of his hand up holding the bar.
So basically
we have 6 frames for his arm moving up to the bar and grabbing
it. |
And there
we have it, the reference for the first part of our animation.
I just pushed the sticks behind the body so it would look
a little more like the finished animation. The next part
wil handle drawing the arm in place of the sticks.
|
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