Tutorial files

Anime Studio Pro is a pretty sensible way of creating assets for an adventure game. In its basics you do drawings and then put bones in them and move them around. You can even have photoshop textures. The latest version of AS has a thing called 'smart bones' which alows you to link point position to bone rotation. It makes rigging much easier.

I am not a big fan of Adobe (aside from After effects) Illustrator in particular I find takes far too many clicks to do anything. I use Xara designer Pro as my vector Swiss army knife (it even does websites now)

Oh yes. distractions......(wanders off to get some left over Christmas cake.)

Lmao

anime studio pro seemed to be lacking in correct forward/backward walking animation.

all the examples I looked at on youtube looked like the characters were waddling.

I understand why people use 3D programs like 3Ds Max for example as you can rotate your characters around & export single frames, but those programs are even more baffling to me than adobe illustrator.

illustrator has some weird thing it does ... when you draw lines it removes any nearby lines if you accidentally draw too close to them which meant a lot of ctrl-z presses.

I've not heard of Xara before - I may look into it.

I've also tried paint tool sai but wasn't keen on the gui.

do you use a wacom tablet for drawing? I have a little wacom bamboo one which is a basic A5 size thing which I can't use very good in pen mode so I changed it to mouse mode - which is easier to control

I think AS has some sort of character creator built in but I haven't used it. It is really up to the animator to do the walking. You can do head turns now with smart bones but it takes a bit of setting up. They are still 2d drawings after all.

3d just adds a whole extra dimension of work.

Yeah. I have a Wacom - Its an intuos 3 A5 widescreen. I would recommend using pen mapping rather than mouse. That kind of negates having a tablet. It takes a little while to get the hang of drawing while looking at a screen but it soon becomes second nature.

Drawing and Paint tools really comes down to personal preference. They have to feel right to use.

My tip for creating artwork would be to keep it simple and not to try for realistic. A stick man adventure would be much more stylish than an inexpertly done full on style.

haha

I'm currently using my wacom tablet as my mouse until I can buy a new keyboard with built in touchpad.

the thing with using A5 tablets in pen mode is they are not very accurate to the screen & take a lot of calibrating/setting up whereas I can use in mouse mode & still draw smooth while controlling stroke width with pressure - plus I can browse at the same time

personally though I would have liked an A4 or A3 wacom touchscreen tablet thingy so you can look at the tablet while drawing as opposed to looking at your desktop/laptop monitor which I find quite awkward ...

shame they are so bloody expensive!

3D depends ... a lot of people use it as once you've created your character or scene & rendered it you just control the camera to get a different view as opposed to drawing in single frames or layers as you would in 2D.

personally I prefer 2D artwork & games unless it's an FPS game like call of duty but even some of then can be fun in 2D or cellshaded.