Minggu, 09 Desember 2012

Aligning objects

A simple but very helpful tool that is often overlooked is the 'Align and Distribute'. It's the answer to a question I have been asked a few time 'How do you place your objects precisely in line?'.

The tool can do a lot more than that by aligning not only objects but groups of objects. 

In order to 'kill two birds with one stone' I am going to use and explain the tool while creating a cute animal. What defines cuteness? Cute usually is achieved by more 'child-like' proportions - round shaped heads, big eyes, small nose, small body. Perfect for my favorite start of a tutorial: "Let's create a circle" - well in this case we create three.     



Note:
Users familiar with Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw for example might ask why I bother with the duplication and rotation when it's already build in. You create one copy, rotate it and the next copy will be a repeated version and you can create the full circle of triangles that way. 
I find this way easier and more controlled when creating evenly spaced content for a circular shape. 

Let's give the lion some facial features. The mouth might like conplexe but really it's just an up-side-down Y and if the deforming of the circle looks too difficult you might try using 3 separate elliptical shapes to create the same effect. 


I added another circle for the body, a deformed circle for the leg and the paw, duplicated them 3 times to create the legs and added a line with a deformed circle with a pointy edge for the tail. A simple (and in my opinion cute) little lion. 

With a little bit more detail (eyelids and eyebrows) it's easy to give the lion some features and create some variations.



Variations don't stop there. Taking the basic shapes, rearranging them and changing the colours you have a whole zoo at your fingertips.




I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and start playing around with the tools inkscape (and other vector tools) have to offer to create some magic. 




Get the source art (svg file) of this tutorial for
USD 3.00

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Alive and snowed under...

It's been a while and I haven't posted for a lot longer than I realized. I missed a major spike in traffic when a news site picked up the helicopter tutorial and barely kept up with the comments due to health problems, too much work, too much fun, too much happening in the real life and I am sure I can find another lot of excuses why I haven't written a new tutorial for a while... but... they will keep coming... I haven't given up on the never-ending quest for better 2D game art. :) 

For now I am snowed under in the true sense of the word. I woke up to a white world outside my window. It started yesterday with a little bit of a white cover but this morning I woke up to 5 cm of snow on my balcony and a good 15 cm (plus) outside. I know - that's nothing for you guys in Canada or other 'polar' regions - but way more than enough for me.

I made my way through perfectly white and fluffy snow (for the 2 minute 'polar expedition' from my flat to the office) for a cup of coffee.

A horrid time to run out of coffee at my place - and it keeps on snowing... 
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