
Explore line tools, arc tool, spiral tool, and grid tools to create straight lines, arcs, spirals, and grids, including a perspective grid and polar grid.
Explore cell shading techniques in Adobe Illustrator by building a character’s color palette with complementary yellow-orange tones, layered fills and strokes, for animation-ready grouping.
Explore the bone system and how bones and a pivot point drive joints and movement. Apply bones to a character to build a basic control workflow for dynamic 2d animation.
Develop a walk cycle by animating a swing leg that catches and leads the next step, with the trailing leg and arms coordinating for a fluid stride.
Create the run animation by adjusting keyframes on a 600-point timeline, switch, refine leg and arm positions, and bring the character down to earth for catching, prepping for secondary animations.
Develop leg poses by adjusting length, maintaining thickness, and applying foreshortening to create believable angles. Add highlights and refine knee caps and feet to complete the look.
Create a hit animation for a game character by crafting frames, momentum, and limb poses from contact to impact, including fetal positioning and eye changes.
In this course, I will teach you how to design and animate 2-D game characters in the simplest, clearest way possible. You will get an over the shoulder viewpoint of my actual workflow from start to finish.
By the end of the series, you will be able to build modular game characters that allow for an unlimited amount of movement and poses needed for most game characters. You will learn how to create expressions and switch them out depending on what actions the characters were taking.
In this course, you will learn:
Always start with the end in mind!
In this course, you will not only learn how to animate 2-D game characters, but I will also teach you how to design characters for multiple screen sizes. Screens are now smaller than ever, and not everyone plays games on a TV, so is essential that we maximize the screen real estate so the main character stands out as they should.
We will also touch on simple color theory so we can create a color scheme for the character that works well with his environment. We will design the character in specific proportions that will allow for the most readability and clear understanding of what the characters capable of as soon as the player sees and interacts with the character.
We will then move on to a basic walk cycle building off the momentum from the simple jump animation we just finished creating. The methodology I'll be using for these lessons is that we make a solid foundational animation, then overlay our secondary animation over the foundation, this ensures that the core animation is complete and we don't get bogged down with details too early.
Enroll today!