Weekly Reflection - Asset Creation

Weekly Reflection - Asset Creation

Over the past week i have set and achieved my S.M.A.R.T goal target and I'm looking back on the work i have created this week and how it has helped me in this module. For my task set by myself i had to complete all of my assets for the fight scene in my own animation. To combat this task i looked at work i had done in the previous year related to asset creation and how i could build upon it. My hardest task was to keep continuity between my assets so that when it came to adding them to my animation they would all fit and flow together rather then jumping too far or changing in scale and shape.

To counter act this issue i could have simply used Photoshop and used opacity settings to trace the next movement assets over the last. However i feel that a better approach based on my own skill was to use a layout pad and light box. I felt that using a traditional approach was better for me because drafting out sketches is more natural to me then drafting in Photoshop where it would be an opposite for say painting. 

Below you can see examples of the basis of the sketches, these required no real detail, only detail to maintenance of shape and scale and working out how one frame would transition to another. This lets me have the safety of knowing when i scan these in all at 300dpi that they will all be the same as they were on paper and transition from one another the same as it does in the layout paper.

To create the silhouettes for the shadow scene i imported my sketches into adobe illustrator and used the mask trace tool. this instantly detected my line work in the sketch and automatically outlined it for me. after this i imported the file into Photoshop and filled in the black outlines with a matching black fill. after i had done all this for every frame i had a clean cut silhouette which was an exact dimension based replica of my sketch drawings.