18/11/22 - Animation Using Photoshop

In today's lesson, we had to use the skills that we had learnt over the past couple of lessons, to create a new character of our choice, and animate their walking sequence using a Walk Cycle Guide that we found. This piece of work, would be called "Walking In Dreamland". 

For my piece of work, I found and used the Walk Cycle Guide of a dinosaur, as I find their movements quite fascinating. I placed this image into a new Photoshop document, which was 16x9cm, 300ppi, and included the Timeline, Swatches, Brushes, and Layers options, the same as our last piece of work, and enlarged it to fit the length of the canvas. I then began to draw the different parts of my dinosaur's body, each being on a new layer, and shading them in, to how I wanted it to finally look. I then centered all of these layers on the page, and made sure that all of these layers were converted into smart objects, and used the Puppet Warp option, to add some pins to each different section, so that I could edit them. I then kept duplicating all of these layers, moving them into their respective lines on the timeline, to create video groups for each body part, and edited these duplications to fit each stage of the Walk Cycle Guide, for each different frame of animation. This allowed me to create a sequence of frames, which when played in a loop, made it look like the dinosaur was walking on the spot.

I then had to edit the background, and did this the same as I had previously, by creating a Sky Layer, and drawing some clouds, birds, and a Sun on it, and then creating a Land layer, which i firstly created, then used the Crop tool, to lengthen the canvas, so that I could make the ground longer. I then converted this layer into a smart object, and re-cropped the canvas down to its original size. With this, I then went back onto the timeline options for this layer, and added in two Keyframes, using the transform option, at the beginning and end of the layer, making sure that on the beginning one, the start of the ground was visible, and for the second one, the ground had been dragged along, so that the opposite end of it was visible. This created the illusion, that when the whole animation was played, the dinosaur, was running along, rather than on the spot, as the ground was moving, however, because the dinosaur also was, it looked like it was the dinosaur that was moving along, and not the ground.

I then saved this animation, and also saved it under a new name, so that I could keep my original work, and edit the copy as well. On this copy, I converted all of the dinosaur layers, into one smart object, to make space on my timeline, and also added in my walking character from yesterday's lesson. I shrunk down this character, as I didn't want them to be the same size as the dinosaur, and placed them just in front, so that when the animation was played, it looked like they were both running, and that the dinosaur was chasing the character.

I then had to export this final piece of work as an mp4 file, by selecting Render Video, and as a GIF file, by selecting Safe for Web (Legacy). We did this, to be able to send the work to other people more easily and have the animation loop for the GIF file, however, we had to put the size percentage down to around 30%, to make it look better.