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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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Making materials: wood

Another quick request tutorial [and there will be more incl. animals, weapons and explosions]. This time it's on wood grain and the colours to chose for you wood material.To get a semi-realistic colourscheme to start with I searched on the world wide web for some reference image and decided on a light wood image that I liked.  Here...

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Tank Tutorial

Here's a quick tutorial on a cute and cartoony tank requested by one of the members on a game development forum.Note:When you scale in Inkscape holding SHIFT+CTRL down allows for the ratio of height to width to stay intact - which is rather helpful at times... Remember to keep moving and overlapping parts separate when exporting to...

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Lightning strikes

I had a request for an electricity effect/ lightning strike and think I found a rather quick and simple way to do it in Inkscape. With a some additions it turns into a night lightning strike.If you want to animate these I suggest doing the lines first and altering a copy of the line shape in a new layer [see the animation tutorial for...

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Character Animation...

I should state that this is just one way of doing animations. It's very similar to old school cut out animations. It's not as fluid as hand drawn animations or 3D work but it's a straight forward and somewhat easy to follow approach. It works quite well with small size sprites. Creating the [soon to be animated] cavemanIt's pretty much...

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Creating more characters...

I am still working on the animation tutorial but thought I post some characters that happened on the side while creating the tutorial...&nbs...

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Cracking up

Here's a quick post on how to create the crack in the office window tutorial. It's basically a quick use of the straight line and bezier curve tool and some moving around of nodes. Note:Combining the spiky shapes (Path/ Union) cleans it up a little bit more - as you won't see the overlaps. Keep in mind to combine two objects at a time...

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Creating a basic face

Taking the last post a little further this tutorial will feature a basic face by using mainly circles (again), some more advanced straight line tool and the node modifier. With the inital setup done it's time to play with the shapes and try out some variations.I hope you enjoyed this addition and it gave you some ideas how to have fun...

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More fun with circles

I just played around with more circles and a different approach to the eyes from the first tutorial... as well as using the bezier curves and straight line tool for some simple shapes.Variation is the key. You can use the elements to form all sorts of critters. As always - I hope you enjoy this tutorial and I hope you have more fun with...

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Creating a game character

 Let's get  started on a simple 2D character. There are a lot of resources and tutorial out there on character creation and animation - most of which written by and for artists and animators. I will try and break in down to simple elements and easy to follow steps. Note:Some of the techniques used in this tutorial have been...

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