Storyboarding Animations

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From the course by Michigan State University

Pixel Art for Video Games

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Michigan State University

Pixel Art for Video Games

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This course is aimed to give you the tools and knowledge you need to start creating simple art for video games. Through the aesthetic of pixel art we will explore artistic principals like shape language, color theory, and composition as well as show you a step by step workflow for creating assets that you can use to make your own games. The course is broken into 4 main modules, props, environments, characters, and animation. Each of these courses will have a series of video lessons alternating between artistic and technical skills culminating in a peer-reviewed project based assignment. The last module will challenge you to take the knowledge learned in the previous 4 and use it to create your own pixel art asset pack. This course is aimed at art novices who are interested in creating art for their own games or contributing to game projects. If you are a game designer or programmer, you will find this course helps give you a glimpse into the world of game art. You will be able to better work with artists, or create your own prototype or final artwork. If you are an artist or visual designer who is interested in bringing your style to the world of video game development, this course will give you the workflow to properly interface with a game engine and help contextualize how your artistic sensibilities can enable gameplay. If you have ever wanted to start making art for video games but have no idea how to start, this course is the perfect for giving you a solid foundation while teaching you usable practical skills.

From the lesson

Week 4: Pixel Art Animation

Storyboarding Animations4:38

Animation in Photoshop2:46

Animating an Idle Animation2:04

Animating a Run Cycle4:38

Jumping Animation3:30

Importing Pixel Animations into Unity4:17

Meet the Instructors

Andrew Dennis
Professor of Practice
Media and Information
Ricardo Guimaraes
Professor of Practice
Media and Information

Hi everyone in this lesson,

we're going to take a brief looking at

story boarding and how to plan the action for your character.

So let's take a look first at the attack sequence for our character.

The best approach is to first roughly sketch the middle action of your sequence.

For example, if she is going to swing her anchor to attack,

we can roughly sketch the middle frame and then

what comes before and after that specific action.

So you can see that that is a pretty slow movement from 1 to 2 so it's

a pretty slow movement from the first frame to the second frame and on

the third frame since the action is more extreme,

we can use a graphic element such as an arrow to indicate that

the movement is much faster than what came before in this way.

You have frames 1, 2 and 3 showing exactly what's

the attack movement of your character will be and you can

see that this doesn't require any sort of detailed sketch.

It's just like a rough idea.

Let's take a look now at the walk cycle.

The movement of the walk cycle can be also indicated by

an arrow and this works as a reminder for whoever's working in production with you,

that's the direction to which the character moves is correct.

And now let's take a look on how we can animate

this walking cycle so we have a smooth movement for our character.

So let's use our dummy here and you can see that I actually

captured the middle of the motion which means it's the middle of the walking cycle.

The best way to do that as we've seen with

our previews sketch is working with the extremes.

So let's add to the cycle the first movement and the last movement.

And you can see that they are pretty much a repetition of the same middle movement.

But notice that we change the position of the arms and

legs in the first frame and the last are the same.

So now all we have to do is begin adding intermediate frames,

intermediate movements to our character to have a complete walking cycle.

So let's do this now.

Let's begin by placing

the intermediate frames so you can see that there is a flow in the movement.

So I'm going to turn you into intermediate movements

between the first and the second and the second and the third.

And now we have five frames that shows

the movement in a much better way and you can see there heads

are at the same line but we can have

even more movement if we introduce intermediate frame to these ones.

So let's introduce another frame here,

and let's introduce another one here,

and now you can see that there is an arc of

movement on the head of the character that makes him feel more lively.

And let's continue introducing intermediate frames here,

and you can see that there is a follow up in the movement so we

can now feel that the character moves up and down as well as forward.

Okay? We have nine frames

here and you can see that the first one and the last one are the same.

So let's see how it plays if we actually have this as an animation.

We can have this as a separate layer here,

okay, and let's see if we superimpose our frames if the animation place in the right way.

Pay a lot of attention to the position of the arms and the legs as

some frames they repeat themselves but the arms and

legs are actually in opposite positions.

Okay? So now we have a fine movement for

our character with a smooth animation and a nice walking cycle.

Try this exercise so you can have

a good feel of the movement and actions of your character.

Thanks for watching and I see you all in the next video.

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