Our upcoming Udemy course will teach you all you need to know to create all 2D art assets for video games, from sprites and textures to backgrounds and marketing images.
You're welcome to download, fork or do whatever else legal with all the files!
You can download the latest state of this section, or go to Commits then download to get our project as it was at the end of any lecture.
Here are the lectures of the course for this section...
- Michael Introduces what it coming up in Section 3
- Animation is an illusion of motion
- Images are our Frames
- The images are shown to us at a regular iterval, called frames per second.
- Layer Order
- Previewing the animation
- Exporting as a GIF
- Direct impact on output
- Yes can be changed later and in game
- Higher FPS means inserting frames, lowers means cutting them to keep the same animation.
- (ms) eg (100ms) : Time that the frame will be showed for.
- (combine) : Mixes the current frame with the one before it- useful with alpha layers
- (replace) Replaces the previous frame regardless of any layers having an alpha layer
Note, the order matters as do the brackets and spacing Recommended Example: LayerName (100ms)(replace)
- Controlling and optimising layer boundaries
- We won’t cover them all in this section.
- Recommended book: Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life
- Start with squash and stretch and apply that to an animation.
- Create a 2 second animation, at 10fps.
- Ball falling off a ledge and hitting the ground
- You can have a layered animation by using Layer Groups
- Layer Groups respect previous layer visibilities
- Neither of these techniques are exclusive, mixing them is fine.
- Picking the appropriate one can be a huge time saver
- Very goof for unpredictable animation like flames water and smoke
- Works because it requires the previous frame for the current one
- Gives the most control
- Get a good idea of the whole scene early on, catching any issues
- Helps keep consistency throughout an animation
- Your character or object ends up in the right place
- How to organise layergroups so that your animations can be layered
- Workflow ideas to speed up multi-layer animations
- How to make animation seem less robotic and more natural
- Techniques for creating more convincing movement
- Steady vs Fast
- Smudge Tool
- Workflow thoughts
- Using Opacity
- Preventing out of memory errors
- Creating An Animated Sunset
- Sprite: an image that’s integrated into a larger scene
- Sprite sheet: many of sprites combined in one image
- Typically associated with 2D animations and GUI elements.
- A “texture atlas” is essentially the same thing but has a different use
- Talking specifically about the pixel x pixel size
- In brief 2^n, where n is a positive integer
- Typical ranges in graphics are from 2^0 or 1px to 2^12 which is 4096px
- The X and Y dimensions can be different
- Usually not necessary, but recommended to prevent uncontrolled blurring or border issues
- Not Power Of Two is referred to as NPOT
- Go for ease of use and organisation rather than all optimisation.
- How is your sprite sheet is going to be read?
- Know your target platform’s maximum texture size
- Recommend no larger than 2048 x 2048 in general
- Avoid mixing different sprite sizes
- Power of two image/sprite isn’t necessary.
- Be aware that NPOT sprites can bleed into one another and have border issues
- Consider packing sprites into POT cells or with extra padding
- For sanity recommend sticking with POT sprites and sprite sheets, then everything fits in properly!
- Make your first sprite sheet
- Share it with us!
- Think of your output first, that filters back to everything else.
- Where is your image ending up?
- In Game?
- On the Web?
- In Print- Box Art and Manuals?
- RAW- Uncompressed eg data straight from a camera sensor.
- Uncompressed (lossless): e.g. BMP, TIFF, TGA...
- Compressed
- Lossy: e.g. JPG
- Lossless: e.g. PNG, GIF*
- GIF is an 8bit indexed (per frame), has transparency (either ON/OFF)
- XCF - Gimps own format, Game Engines and most other programs do NOT understand this file type
- PSD - Photoshop document
- Creating all of your images as PNGs will make your project consistent and save space
- Avoid resaving a JPG, each time you do that you will lose more information
- Converting JPG to PNG is great if you need to edit
- If you are having an issue with PNGs
- If the target destination needs it in another format
- This lecture is all about testing your work straight away
- We’ll search for a tool
- Use it to test that our sprite sheet behaves as expected
- How and where to install script and python files
- Mac installation at 3 mins
- Challenge at 5 mins
- How to use the fuse layer filter we just added
- The caveats and things to watch out for when using it
- How to use the sprite sheet filter we have added
- Really easy to use, but just makes one long strip, which might be problematic
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We now getting the need for reference material
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Drawing from your mind can cause odd looking work
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Reference material will be both still pictures and video
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Drawn or photos are both OK
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Videos for natural movement of objects
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They’re going to define your image and animation
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Guide and Influence the end result
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Just following along or without reference material will lead to frustration and a lot of wasted time.
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Be mindful of licences, especially if you use the source material directly.
- How to use graphical elements to repeat work
- Fleshing out the wall
- Creating a variation using the wall as a base
- Mocking up our scene to get an idea of the final animation
- Important to make the scene more interesting
- Essential for managing animation with multiple elements
- Helps keep elements separated and organised
- A Filter that can help smooth out your animations
- Unfortunately it has a couple of drawbacks
- Finish making your end animations
- Produce a final animation for your scene
- Make it between 2-5 seconds long
- Keep it simple and straightforward
- Congratulations
- Michael and Ben wrap up the section