I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet which set me back £80 but I think it is a great investment which will both increase the quality of my work and decrease the time I spend on it!. If I had had this a few months ago, while making The Shadow Diablo game, I would've spent a lot less time doing the graphics in illustrator. I have never used a graphic tablet other than this but from what I have heard it is an excellent starting point. It has good touch sensitivity and can be used for navigation making it an efficient and powerful sidekick to many of the programs which us IMD students use on a daily basis. Above is my first shot at digital paining. I am already finding it easier to use and am slowly beginning to become familiar with the way that brushes are used. I did this from a tutorial, which is an excellent introduction to digital painting and although I know that my version isn't as good as the example, it is a first attempt and not bad for a first try. Here is the tutorial anyway. I will be posting more links to tutorials and what I have made from them in future.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
My New Toy = Wacom Bamboo Touch and Pen
I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet which set me back £80 but I think it is a great investment which will both increase the quality of my work and decrease the time I spend on it!. If I had had this a few months ago, while making The Shadow Diablo game, I would've spent a lot less time doing the graphics in illustrator. I have never used a graphic tablet other than this but from what I have heard it is an excellent starting point. It has good touch sensitivity and can be used for navigation making it an efficient and powerful sidekick to many of the programs which us IMD students use on a daily basis. Above is my first shot at digital paining. I am already finding it easier to use and am slowly beginning to become familiar with the way that brushes are used. I did this from a tutorial, which is an excellent introduction to digital painting and although I know that my version isn't as good as the example, it is a first attempt and not bad for a first try. Here is the tutorial anyway. I will be posting more links to tutorials and what I have made from them in future.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Abstract Background
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/Abstract-Background-in-Photoshop/54793
I just did this tutorial, which was alright in the sense that it produced an interesting image but the tutorial itself didn't really explain one of the steps very well. In fact it went from A to C, bypassing B completely. I did work it out though in the end though; when it says rezize the image on the second page, you will actually need to skew it to make it into a triangle shape then make 3 copies of it and rotate them round the centre to get the starburst effect.
First turn your rulers on if they aren't already on. Change your background layer into a proper layer so that it can have transparency. Select the move tool and make sure the transform handles are visible, the make 2 guidelines by dragging from the ruler, marking the centre of the "burst". Then hold down ctrl and drag the top two corners into the central point, then move the other two points so that the triangular shape intersects with the bottom corners of the page. You will probably need to play around with the distance to get it looking right. Then just duplicate and rotate to make a full radial burst. I used a slight blur afterwards just to smooth everything out after the tranformation. Here are a few different versions of the one I did, using different layer effects on the highest layer.
Avatar!
OFF TOPIC (sort of)
First of all I saw Avatar the other day in 3D. I felt like films had taken a monumental leap forward and I truly believe that James Cameron's masterpiece has set a new standard in film and that this next generation of movies will bring people back to the cinema. He raised the bar on so many different platforms just like he did in Terminator 2 and Aliens. The methods he used to create the film were absolutely genious and I am sure we will see these used more and more in the near future. I could go on for ever about it but I will end it here and say that if you haven't seen it yet then go see it now in 3D because the reason it has had so much hype is because it really is that good!
ON TOPIC
I found a good tutorial (HERE) recently that tells you how to make you own Na'vi in photoshop using an image of your choice. I think this is becoming a bit of a craze already by the looks of things as I have seen quite a few people doing the same thing. Its only a matter of time before we're seeing snazzy na'vi avatars, chavvy na'vi avatars and slaggy na'vi avatars (try saying that fast after a few pints!) Anyway here is my addition to this craze.
I will say that I did a few bits differently. I found a combination of the smudge and clone stamp tool to be really useful when smoothing things up. On the nose especially. Also when you get to the bit where you change the coloured bits of the eyes you will need to mess around with the britghtness and contrast aswell as the colours. I would also recommend adding a inner glow to them aswell as it makes the eye look much more defined. For the stripes I just made a new layer, cut some stripe shapes out using the polygon lassoo tool (and holding the shift key to make multiple selections,) then I used the fill tool to fill the shapes with a dark blue, then added a gaussian blur to make it much softer. Then I went into the layer effects and gave it a shadow with a distance of 0. Use a darker blue and make it quite faint. It just helps make the stripes look defined but not too defined. Then alter the layer settings to make it a hard light adjustment layer. I would recommend using the eraser tool at this point, but turn the opacity down and hardness right down to 0 and just erase bits that look a bit too dark. For the white dots, create another new layer and use a small soft brush and add a very slight shadow to them, also with a distance of 0.
I have done my girlfriend, which I'm not 100% happy with (the avatar not the girlfriend), Ewan McGreggor (who apparently I have a man crush on, whatever that means) and the wrestler Dave Batista (Simply because he's a bit of a giant monster already and would fit the part as a more "stacked" na'vi.) Hope you like them anyway, please give feedback as its always welcome. Cheers.
I will say that I did a few bits differently. I found a combination of the smudge and clone stamp tool to be really useful when smoothing things up. On the nose especially. Also when you get to the bit where you change the coloured bits of the eyes you will need to mess around with the britghtness and contrast aswell as the colours. I would also recommend adding a inner glow to them aswell as it makes the eye look much more defined. For the stripes I just made a new layer, cut some stripe shapes out using the polygon lassoo tool (and holding the shift key to make multiple selections,) then I used the fill tool to fill the shapes with a dark blue, then added a gaussian blur to make it much softer. Then I went into the layer effects and gave it a shadow with a distance of 0. Use a darker blue and make it quite faint. It just helps make the stripes look defined but not too defined. Then alter the layer settings to make it a hard light adjustment layer. I would recommend using the eraser tool at this point, but turn the opacity down and hardness right down to 0 and just erase bits that look a bit too dark. For the white dots, create another new layer and use a small soft brush and add a very slight shadow to them, also with a distance of 0.
I have done my girlfriend, which I'm not 100% happy with (the avatar not the girlfriend), Ewan McGreggor (who apparently I have a man crush on, whatever that means) and the wrestler Dave Batista (Simply because he's a bit of a giant monster already and would fit the part as a more "stacked" na'vi.) Hope you like them anyway, please give feedback as its always welcome. Cheers.
Hello World
After devoting my time to learning Actionscript 3.0 for my recent uni games project I decided it would be a good idea to document things I learn in other areas. This is for my own personal reference so I can look back and see how I've progressed and some of this stuff may also be useful in my design documents. I will be posting stuff I have done and how I did it. If I used a tutorial then I will say a bit about the tutorial and any additional tips that I discover along the way. I'm focusing on photoshop at the moment but I am going to try and learn some web coding stuff at some point soon as well, which I am not particularly looking forward to but I know it is important. Anyway hope you find this interesting!
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