Week 8 – Moodwalks, TVPaint, Head Turns and scale
Week 8 begun where I left off last week: mood changing walk cycles. Now, because I started without really reading what Steve wanted, I had to make a few adjustments to my walk “cycle” to make it less of a cycle. What Steve specified was a character moving from one side of the screen to the other, not an on-the-spot cycle that I’ve grown used to.
Since I’d already committed to a scrolling background, I did both a scrolling background and a moving character. Steve showed how he made a 3D character move by using blocks to determine the space between each step, so I did the same, albeit motion tweening the character to move on each frame. It’s something I’d like to get feedback on, and potentially make the exercise feel like there’s more a story going on, rather than all of these random elements at the moment.
We also started to explore TV paint this week, looking at mark-making and the various brushes the program has. The exercise involved us making a background that a character will turn and look at both sides. I went for a classic angel and devil look using really soft brushes like crayons and oil paints. The end result is a child-like drawing, inspired by certain scenes from Mob Psycho II. At first, I was a little disappointed, especially when looking at my peers going for detailed perspective drawings, but given mine boils, I can’t be too critical about my own work.
I was inspired by my peers to try again when I got home from class, but unless I bought the whole TVPaint software (which I’m not ready to commit to yet), the trial version meant I couldn’t save a second version. Whilst it defeats the purpose of learning new brushes, I had another ago using Clip Studio Paint to make a more dramatic, Evangelion-inspired background using basic shapes, blur tools, hues of red and lighting to fit the character in. I’m happy with the result, though I’m not sure it’ll actually be anything I can submit for my portfolio.
Lastly, we had another life-drawing session with Mary-Clare. I found this one particularly useful because we focused on scale: how drastic can a person change size by walking one or two steps forwards toward a “camera”? It was weird drawing over our previous drawings to larger ones, but it really helped convey scale, as well as getting us to look for reference points to scale the model properly (i.e. how far their head is from a door frame etc.). A very helpful class for things I need to improve on in the future.
Next week is four-legged walk cycles, I’ve already made a start but shall keep it under wraps for now.