Run cycle and Stand cycle

The only thing I really had to do with the run cycle now was to add colour to it. Before anything I had to come up with the basic colours I would use. I choose four colours, ranging from a mid-tone, highlight and two darker tones. Since I was creating a vector style I decided to just simply go with the cell shade method. 

Doing this was simple enough since I used the lasso tool to select parts that I would want to colour in. So selecting the colour I needed, I used the lasso tool to make selections neatly. Once I filled him with just one colour, I went over him in detail with the lasso tool. I done all this on a different layer and set the layer to multiply so that the colour could be seen under the line work. I did this process for the shadows and the highlights.

Since everything was pretty much done the process didn’t really take that long. The most part I just went over everything and cleaned everything up, taking off the existing white background I previously used.

Before this I tried another method of colouring and this just didn’t turn out how I wanted. I was blending everything in and it just ended up too dark and I lost the detail. So choosing the way I had done it, kept everything inline and very crisp.

Since I had pretty much finished everything I decided to see what it would look like as a GIF format to see if anything could be fixed. 

As you can see everything came out alright. With the odd white bits left from the background, I had to go back into Photoshop and clean it up. I don’t this method by having a black background on a different layer so I could see the white marks left behind. Once I cleaned everything up, I then deleted the black layer and saved it again. 

This would be the finished run animation and as you can see from the first post I had put a lot of effort and time into it. Even though it seemed simple, there was a lot of twist and turns that happened along the way and set me back quite a bit of time. 

 The Standing Cycle

Since I decided to focus most of my time on the running cycle and it ended up taking more time that I planned too, I was still left with the standing cycle and the death cycle to do. So the next thing I focused on was the standing cycle. 

I decided to draw him so you could see the front of his body so therefore I had to redraw his upper body and lower body. Although I didn’t have to draw everything since I used the head from the previous run cycle. So still on the same save, I used the lasso tool to select the head and duplicated it. I then erased and deleted all the layers except just the head as this gave me a fresh start. 

Using the hard edge brush tool I took reference from existing standing sprites and tried to draw my character standing still. At this point I had to keep in mind that I had to show him breathing and that his cloak would move also.

As you can see above I created four drawings that consisted of his cloak moving and giving the effect that he was moving up and down from breathing. I didn’t move the legs much but since I moved him and made him slightly taller, I feel like that gives it enough movement. Also on the 4^th drawing I removed the eyes so when played in GIF format, he would look like he was blinking. 

Once I created the drawings, I reused them so that the cloak was moving smoothly. Creating 12 frames, this gave it enough to move without it looking jumpy. I also added fireflies that moved around him. As I stated in the previous post I found out the hard way about creating a layer after I already created the frames. So when creating the fireflies, they appeared on all the layers and I had to move them from the original spot, losing where they was on the previous frame.

At the same time of creating this, the other artist gave the designer his work. But upon doing so lead to some problems with how he exported the file. Since the designer needed the files to be on a transparent background, I said I would help out. The other artist gave me his files and I just quickly fixed the files that needed to be fixed. This was either exporting the file itself or just darkening the image if needed so. I also had to adjust the background for the world since we wanted to use it as a repeat process but they didn’t match. So I took them into Photoshop and aligned them to match so we could reuse them over and over.

After this I was then able to begin on doing the colouring process for my standing animation. Since I had the colours from the running cycle I was able to do the colour in very quick time. Also since each frame hardly moved, I was able to duplicate the colouring to save a lot of time. I had to either use the erase tool and erase some colouring or used the brush tool to fill in the blanks. 

The next part was to simple put it all together to create the GIF format. Since it was pretty much the same process as the running cycle, I had to go into detail and erase all the white background. I gave this to the designer also so that I could see how it would look in the game. Once we was all happy, I was able to create the colour GIF for a final image. 

So taking the same process as before, I created the GIF but there was a problem and I realised that I must have missed click something and the save went funny, so I had to re save it.

This is the coloured standing animation.