Character Profile  

Matte Painting   Matte painting is a technique used in photography and special effects film making to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image, often a representation of a landscape, set, or distant location. The technique allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location. It is one of the oldest and most widely applied techniques in the visual effects industry because it can help create a setting that would otherwise be too expensive, inconvenient, or impossible to film live. In both its traditional and current digital form, […]

The animation for our brief has been specified as 2D, and we can do anything that we like (within the genre and target audience) as long as it is in 2D. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot utilise 3D, and use it as an illusion. One way this can be done is by bringing environments to life an effect called parallax. So firstly, what is parallax? Well, Google’s definition is: The effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera. Through […]

In this lesson, I learned two different ways to bring some more life into an environment, using After Effects: how to create smoke, and embers of a fire, both of which are 2D atmospherics that can really add some depth to a setting. I started out with creating smoke, with a new composition in After Effects (5 seconds) and a solid layer named ‘smoke’. With that layer selected, I went into the ‘effects’ section at the top, down to ‘noise & grain’, and selected ‘fractal noise’. A smoky texture immediately appeared on my screen, but it was not animated.   […]

After doing a lesson on an easy method on doing character design, next, we moved onto environment design, to learn about some tips and methods on creating settings for our animations. Firstly, we went back to basics and recapped perspective. Perspective is incredibly important when creating any sort of setting, especially 3D ones. Even if an image is 2D however, perspective makes it possible to see it in a 3D space, because of the vanishing point, which is the point when all of the perspective lines within an image intersect. The name is fitting because, at that point, we cannot see any […]

To start some character design, we had a tutorial lesson on how to create silhouettes for character concept art. I had never really heard or seen of this method although I knew about silhouettes and how they are used in art. I was quite curious about how we could create any sort of character design using just shadows and light. We started off identifying different features and aspects of various fantasy characters and then trying this whilst just looking at their silhouettes. There were actually a lot of fo things we could tell about a character just from looking at […]

Sometimes, editing pictures can be a faster and easier way to produce concepts for characters, and since this could help with the fantasy brief, we had a tutorial on how to create a vampire (and later on an orc/goblin) in photoshop. For this post, I won’t be including every part of the tutorial, I’ll just be explaining which parts I used or wanted to use and how I made myself into a vampire.   Vampire   The first thing I do, and the thing I always start with when I’m trying to create a piece of art (or create anything […]