Hi I'm doing a video game character facing forward (Can't upload image in Tinypic because it's blocked in my country)
Anyway I don't know how to go through with the hands and sword etc. Because these are going to be facing in different directions while I animate, especially the hand, it could be a fist facing forward or facing down or upward etc.
1) How do you recommend I go about this? Should I draw different hands with different facing and hide the ones I don't need?
Questions for general tips
2) Do you recommend I draw each body part and it's shading/highlights in a different layer?
3) How do you recommend I share files on this forum?
Are you sure TinyPic is blocked in your country. For me, TinyPic is just broken right now. I haven't been able to post images for several days now, and another U.S. user confirmed that it was broken for him too.
Re: hand poses and such.
Normally, I make a bunch of drawings in different angles and drop them in a switch layer. Combined with bones, you can make the transitions pretty smooth in many cases. That's probably the simplest and quickest way to handle something like this. Well, usually. I've done rigs with as many as 55 hand poses and it does take time to set that up. Most of the time, I only have no more than 10 poses though, some with morphing shapes controlled by a smart bone dial.
Alternatively, I might create fewer elements using vectors, and setup Smart Bones or SBD's to morph the shapes and slide texture fills. This method is especially good for more subtle turns and slow movements.
It's also possible to make shapes morph inside a switch layer from one drawing to the next. To do this, you need to use the same 'base' drawing and reshape it in each switch, and enable Interpolate Sub-layers. Sometimes I'll use this.
In most situations, I rely on smart bones or SBD's to control the transitions. For example, For example, tipping the foot bone up might reveal the bottom of a shoe by reshaping the the shoe shapes and revealing a hidden 'sole' shape. Or maybe turning the foot bone transitions the foot artwork from left, to middle, to right poses. Or you could do this as an SBD outside of the main skeleton.
I highly recommend studying some of the ASP 10, 11, and Moho 12 demo characters that come with the program. You can learn a lot from deconstructing them.
Re: shading. Moho has some excellent effects available that can simulate directional lighting, and it's mostly automatic.
On shapes, use Shaded and/or drop shadow. If you setup a style, it's easier to make global changes to lighting direction for many shapes. It's also possible to link lighting direction to an SBD but I don't think I've ever bothered to do that.
You can use shading and shadow effects on layers and groups too. Sometimes it makes more sense to apply it here rather than directly on the shapes. For example, if you have a hand that's made up of many welded segments, using shading in the shapes will isolate to lighting to ever single shape, which will probably look bad. But if you apply shading to the hand group instead, you'll get shading on the whole hand as if it was created as a single shape. To set these effects in a layer or group, you need to open Layer Settings and click the Shadows tab.
Another good shading trick is to make your highlight/shadow shapes that follows the shape of your character. This is useful if you need very specific lighting shapes that the normal shading effects might not be able to provide. If you use the character itself as a mask for the shading shapes, you do not need to follow the contour of the character precisely--just draw the outer side of the shape loosely and let it go beyond the edge. It won't matter because the mask will trim that part out. If you bind the shading shapes to the bones, the shading will bend and move with the character (assuming you have enough points in the shapes for this.) To make these shading shapes work best, you might want to reduce their opacity and maybe even use a special blending mode. If the shading has color, Screen works well for highlights and Multiply works well for shadows.
Thanks a lot my friend
That gave me a lot of info that I need to study and find tutorials for because I usually don't know how to do a lot of stuff you mentioned but I get the general idea.
I don't know a lot about anime studio because I am pretty new. I am not too familiar with drawing humans and while I am having another artist help me with character references I know my characters will have many action scenes and I will have to figure out some of the movements myself. So anyway I bought manga studio because of the 3-d human models to help with movement scenes. I don't know if it will help or not, but if your having some problems figuring out the shape of the hand maybe you can upload so stick figure drawings and can send back pictures of the 3d model. It is very basic and it can't hold a sword but maybe it would help. I am also just learning that program so please be patience with me if you what some help that way. My character have to use swords too. : )
w3rew0lfgirl_99 wrote:I don't know a lot about anime studio because I am pretty new. I am not too familiar with drawing humans and while I am having another artist help me with character references I know my characters will have many action scenes and I will have to figure out some of the movements myself. So anyway I bought manga studio because of the 3-d human models to help with movement scenes. I don't know if it will help or not, but if your having some problems figuring out the shape of the hand maybe you can upload so stick figure drawings and can send back pictures of the 3d model. It is very basic and it can't hold a sword but maybe it would help. I am also just learning that program so please be patience with me if you what some help that way. My character have to use swords too. : )
Thanks, I think I figured out what I must do thanks to the awesome D.R Greenlaw.
