Home » Semua post
Senin, 20 Februari 2012

Creating a brick building

This is a tutorial requested by one of the readers on how to create a building made of brick. In order to clarify what he meant I quickly created this one and wrote up the tutorial to explain the steps. 


There are a few  problem when adding pattern added to a shape. You have to make sure it's seamless (it tiles properly horizontally and vertically). You have to make sure it scales well with your object (too much detail might be lost in a smaller view and too little detail will look boring) and you need to make sure it matches the illustration style (a bitmap photo in a vector illustration might cause serious inconsistency in the look and feel). 


This is a brick building. We all recognize the pattern but it looks boring because the blocks are too big and too even. It's also not the best design for a house. 


Let's get started with a bunch of rectangles and build a more interesting looking house and then add the nicer brick pattern to it.



So... We got a simple yet decent looking house...


put into a row with varying colours it looks rather nice. It's open to a lot of designs now (e.g. you could add wood boards as a pattern and place it in Scandinavia.).  


For now we are after bricks so let's add some pattern.


When creating a pattern always try and look at the larger project rather than the one element you are working on. Will you need to reuse the pattern? Will there be colour variations? Do I need to make it scalable? You can save a lot of time and repetitive work  if you keep those questions in mind. Work with e.g. transparent elements for shaders rather than tinted variation of the base colour or convert your lines into paths to allow for a proper scaling.


I hope you enjoyed the tutorial as much as I did creating it. Have a great day and keep your creativity flowing.




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

templates-office.com
Kamis, 16 Februari 2012

Creating a character with outlines

Here's one request I have read a few times now: 'How do you make a character with outlines?'. It's not much different from any other character creations you just add a little more difficulty and a few problems to work around. 

The main problems I see with a lot illustrations using outlines are: a) the inconsistent line weight (different thickness of the stroke for different elements on the screen). It's a little more complicated and takes some thought to design the screen balanced. My advice is to keep it either keep it all at the same thickness or use a thicker brush for all the focus elements (eg. characters, logo, UI elements) and create the background with a thinner stroke. b) the colouring of stroke vs. the colour of the shape. c) the line weight does not correspond with the illustration. You might have noticed it in comic books, illustrations or animated cartoons - the stroke is not consistent in thickness. It starts thinner, goes thick and ends thin again giving it more of a brush feeling. If it's done right it really enhances the image but it's a time-consuming art. Simply using tools in Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw to create dynamic brushes usual ends up looking wrong.  

All those problems aside. Let's start with something simple.In this tutorial we will do a little piglet with a plain black stroke that stays consistent throughout the elements. In one of the next tutorials I will cover more complex and modified outlines.

The last two steps show one of the main problems with outlines - the overlapping of elements creates lines we don't want to see. You could just combine the snout and the head. Simply making it one object would result in problems animating it afterwards. This becomes even more visible in arms and legs. I prefer just adding shapes to cover those overlaps.


The tail might not the usual corkscrew design you see in a lot of pig illustrations - it was one of those cases of thinking you know how it looks versus the way it looks. In the end I checked on Google images [the best invention since sliced bread] and had a look at real piglets and found this cute little tail more appropriate.


And the last step - I forgot to add it to the tutorial pages - (remember I am fresh off the vacation) is a cover shape for the legs to join them with the body. 

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Get out inkscape and start creating!
Get the source art (svg file) of this tutorial for
USD 3.00

templates-office.com

Vacation is over!

I am back from the vacation and glad to be home. The two week cruise to NZ is over, the suitcase unpacked and it's time to post. 

Besides doing nothing, eating too much good food and sleeping 2x as much as usual, I used the time on the ship to draw and sketch on my iPad and I might just do the odd tutorial on how to get the most out of the drawing tools available. 

After two weeks of not having computers or internet [ship's internet was painfully slow and overpriced to the point of being ridiculous] it's good to be back...

All refreshed, recharged and ready to roll I will try and work through all the requests for tutorials from you guys. :)


templates-office.com
Rabu, 18 Januari 2012

Cartoon Cactus

After a not quite so smooth start into the new year - with health problems [starting to really get annoyed with those] and my work laptop dying on me [thanks to a dead graphics card] - I am finally back in the swing of things and working through the wish list of tutorials I received. 

Here's one from Andrea - a cartoon cactus - which happens to be an extra element I created for the BlockBuddies Cowboy Bundle.

 
I hope this is helpful, Andrea. Enjoy!

Get the source art (svg file) (does not include the BlockBuddies cowboy) of this tutorial for
USD 3.00

templates-office.com
Sabtu, 31 Desember 2011

Happy New Year

All the best for the New Year! It's already started here and even though I was not down in Sydney to see the fireworks first hand they still looked amazing on TV. Being the designated driver meant I was restriked to a sip of champagne at midnight and by the time I got home I was to tired and forgot about the nice, cold, German beer in the fridge - on the up side: I am up early to experience a nice and calm first morning of 2012. 

I am looking forward to an exiciting year, with a lot of tutorials in the works and your feedback to keep me pushing on and trying to reveal more fun with vectors. 
templates-office.com
Jumat, 23 Desember 2011

Merry Christmas...


As usual I am a little late sending out my Christmas emails... I just couldn't decide on a nice design, got carried away with fun projects and now Christmas is here... and I will have to go with the 'naked truth' about my Australian Christmas - it's too hot to wear anything but shorts and t-shirt, way too hot for the roast for lunch, simply too much food (it starts with a brunch this year, a lunch with the family and a dinner (that I am not too sure will happen at all) and in the end a beer [or two :) ] in the pool... I can't wait!

Thanks for all the feedback and praise, the critique and support. Have a great holiday season and all the best for 2012.
templates-office.com
Minggu, 18 Desember 2011

Game Assets - BlockBuddies

Instead of working on the next tutorial I spent the weekend working on some easy to use game assets and am wondering if there is interest for something like it. 

So far I have done 16 sets of ~50 frames (each in 4 sizes from S (64x64) to XL (256x256)) covering zombies, cowboys, adventurer, soldiers and the odd blue alien with samurai, ninja, romans and a range of animals in the pipeline.

[Click to get to the character sheets]

The sets sell for USD 15.00 with the bundles (containing 3 characters) selling at USD 37.50 and two character sets going for USD 20.00.

Here's a sample sheet of the Block Buddies Dummy character:


[box (6 frames), kneel, doze, fall flat, ko, big gun [stand and crouch], gun [stand and crouch], flat, flying after a knock, idle, jump, jump high, jump higher, jump joy, jump land, jump far, push, run (8 frames), sit, stab, walk (8 frames)]

Here's the download link for the png files:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/BlockBuddies/Dummy.rar
templates-office.com
Minggu, 11 Desember 2011

Back with a BANG!

I was asked to write a tutorial on explosions, which didn't seem that hard until I started... It's become common practice to use particle effect for most ingame explosions, so doing an explosion by hand was a bit of a challenge.

I stared out with a simple very generic explosion and took it from there, added to it and added some more. Let's start with the first simple explosion.


It's a fairly generic, cartoon style explosion - quick and easy to create [and animate - by scaling the elements and fading to either light or dark as the explosion progresses]. 

Usually blowing things up leaves more than just a flash of light. Dust and smoke clouds and debris are part of a good explosion. Let's add some of that.

This is still a very cartoony look. Let's try something a little less 'flat' and add some volume to the explosions.

 
 This explosion is a bit more work to animate. You would start with a smaller light centre that would grow and add more circles to it that go darker as they reach the outside. The flash in the centre is just that - a flash - don't keep it on for too long or it will look more like a light source than an explosion. As this explosion dies down the dark circles would go grey and black, shrink and fall apart [either by imploding or falling to the ground]. 

As this is way too much fun - let's try another one. Similar to the last one but a little more compact, detailed and with some shading.


I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do... It's just too much fun to blow things up in style and I have to stop myself now and try and catch up with work (before writing the next tutorial that's already playing havoc with my imagination). 

Have fun and as always let me know how you go with the tutorial.
Get the source art (svg file) of this tutorial for
USD 5.00

templates-office.com
Minggu, 04 Desember 2011

Time out...

Just a quick update to the blog - the next couple of tutorials are in the pipeline but won't be up for another few days.



In the midth of house cleaning, gardening, pondering about writing a book and trying to get some work done, my body decided to take a time out and I spent the better part of the weekend in bed totally depleted of energy, reading books, playing with the ipad and just taking it easy... and I have to tell you - I could get used to that... ;)
templates-office.com
Rabu, 30 November 2011

The Clip Tool - revisited

I had a few questions about the clip tool - as it's a little bit of a pain in inkscape and not the easiest to handle in Adobe Illustrator either. 

I use clipping masks a lot as you can create shading and patterns inside objects qucikly and still keep the shapes - while a path intersection destroys the base shapes. 

I made this set of tutorials for Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. I prefer the ease of CorelDraw over the other two - with Inkscape lacking some key features to make working with an essential tool like clip masks easy on the user.


Let's take if from the simple shaded ball to something more complex (e.g. a cartoony plane I just did for another tutorial). In order to do the shading on the body (the darker blue part at the bottom of the plane) or the white stripes, you have to create intersecting shapes to cut the white stripes or the lighter body to match the base shape. 

It's a lot quicker and easier to create the clip mask and 'throw' a shape in there - even more so when the shapes get more complex (e.g. a floral pattern on wallpaper) - and it allows you to 'undo' the action and release the clip again.



Note: 
Doing clips inside clips is not possible in inkscape as far as I know [but I might be wrong]. In order to work around that problem try and use the Path/ Intersection tool to create a shape matching inside a base object. 
 

Note: 
Once you have created a clipart you can work with the objects inside the clip art just like any other object in Illustrator (e.g. arrange to bring them to the front or send them back inside the stack of objects in your clipping mask).


Even though things might be a little easier to achieve in the other programs Inkscape allows you to achieve the same results with a little bit of patience and trial and error.

Good luck and enjoy your vector bending.

Note:
The toolbar of CorelDraw and Illustrator might have changed slightly as I am not up to date on either program. I am still using CorelDraw14 and Illustrator CS.
Get the source art (ai, cdr, svg file) of this tutorial for
USD 3.00

templates-office.com
Langganan: Postingan (Atom)