Adobe Fresco: Designing Characters and Sets for Animation

Fresco has an auto save feature that tracks any change made to your document. This can be saved to both your local device and the Adobe cloud storage. Here we go over all this, as well as how to organize and filter previous documents.

You can share your project with other Fresco users so they can comment and share their own ideas right within the app. Here we show how to do that.

While Fresco will automatically save your steps, you will need to export your artwork out as an image or .psd if you wish to work beyond the application. Here we demonstrate how this can be done.

Pixel brushes allow us to draw bitmap based art on the canvas. There are many brushes to choose from, as well as several options to help alter the look.

Live brushes give you the benefit of dynamic effects, such as residual water from a water color brush or mixing oil paints together. This lecture demonstrates both categories.

Vectors have the benefit of being lossless in quality when zooming in on a scene or enlarging an asset. You can also mold the lines like clay and take the art into Illustrator for further work.

Fresco comes with may brushes. So many you may find yourself wanting to organize your own list of them. Additionally, you can import Photoshop brushes for more functionality, which is also demonstrated in this lecture.

In addition to drawing and painting, we can smudge, erase and instantly fill in artwork. Here we go over the rest of the Fresco tools to ready yourself for the projects ahead.

Fresco comes with a wide range of selection tools. This can be useful for moving, resizing and rotating assets. Also, you can go further with warp effects to really add a twist to your creation.

Copying, cutting and pasting are three essential features for when it comes to design and organization. This lecture goes over all this.

Fresco has three main layer types depending on what brush you're using or if you plan to import images. This lecture goes over what you need to know.

Blend modes are a great way to add different effects, as well as colors, to your artwork. In addition, there are other layer tools to consider as you work. Here we go over this process.

Masking is a great way to focus on adding details to certain layers without interfering with key parts of the artwork. Here we go over a few ways we can apply masking in Fresco.

To begin the design process, we are going to create a sketch. This will give us a guide for applying clean ink lines for the final design.

While a sketch isn't meant to be perfect, there are certain things we can do to help refine the template for the inking phase. That's what we will do in this lecture.

Using the sketch, we can now begin applying nice clean ink lines for the head of the character.

Next we focus on the body, arms and legs by applying clean ink lines.

Here we use three references to create three hand phases for the character to choose from when it comes time to animate.

We begin the process of filling in our shapes. This involves closing off shapes and using the Fill tool.

While we could create the back limbs by hand, to keep things uniform, we will duplicate them. This will give us an opportunity to try out more features that Fresco offers.

Here we continue working on the character by adding details to the clothes, including a belt and undershirt.

Drawing a mouth and grouping it with seven other poses will allow us to lip sync a character once we reach the animation phase. This lecture covers the creation of these other phonemes or mouth poses.

Like the mouth, the eyes can be grouped with different phases, such as a blink, to be utilized in animation later on.

By clipping layers, we can mask in some shading on various layers of the character. Then, by using blend modes, we can create a nice shaded effect that's not too dark or light.

Like the previous lecture, here we will make use of masking once again to add highlights to the character to help contrast with the shaded spots.

Again with masking, we can add in a texture to go over the character's layers for a stylized look.

While nailing your design is important, what really matters is how you organize your layers. As this will help prepare you for rigging and animating in your application of choice. In this lecture we merge and rename layers to make sure everything is ready for export.

In this lecture we show again how to export a file as a .psd. In this case, for use in animation software.

Head turns can be implemented like your mouth, eyes and hands. It requires a group, and then from there, a break down of all the important layers for each head phase. This lecture shows an example of a character setup like this.

The Precession tool allows us to set up our perspective grid in many ways. Here we make use of 2-point perspective to sketch out a hallway in a futuristic spaceship.

Using the sketch as a guide, watercolors will be applied to help build up the set. We will use a more freehand approach to this, but rulers and grids can be used, if desired.

With the basic colors in, we can now add more details to the scene.

Here we will add some links to the background to help cleanup some elements.

By using different colors and blend modes, we can add more atmosphere to the background image.

Like your character, it's important to think about what layers are needed for animation. Or which layers need to be separated to allow characters to go behind or in front of certain assets.

Here we export the background out for animation.

Here we bring the character into Character Animator and demonstrate camera control, draggable arms and auto lip syncing.

Animate offers a lot of options. From frame by frame to tweening to bones, there is a lot to choose from. Here we demonstrate some basic examples.

After Effects is quite robust and even offers animation. While most of its power can be harnessed through add-ons and plugins, the Puppet Pin Tool is a quick and easy way to add animation.

Moho 14 is one of the best 2D animation apps available and Fresco's .psd work perfectly with it. Here we provide a brief demonstration.

While Fresco is great, you may find it easier to organize layers in Photoshop or other .psd capable applications.

Since Fresco saves every step you make, a time lapse video can be produced from your work. This is a cool novelty that has unique uses.

Fresco allows you to create frame by frame animations that can be exported out as .gifs, png sequences and .mp4s. Here we create a basic animation for testing purposes.

My final thoughts on this course.