Keeping It Going

So I might go a month between posts or have the ability to do several back to back to back posts. Look at that! So now that Shot Bar is out I'm going to toss up some of these. These are a collection of some of the favorite head shots of mine that I did for the game. Basically for the game I did just about all of the art assets (bottles, labels, pour animation, expression changes on the characters.) As I noted before it had to be kept to real simple animation but in the end really super animation would have probably distracted from the potential pace of the game. All in all I had to do quite a few characters but they were all bust shots. Some of the above shots were first passes after which corrections had to be made. I learned quite abit on streamlining my own work flow through this project.







I think I'm sold on the whole flatting plugin. I've never been able to get crisp flats like this before. I've gotten the color flat process down of course but this method just really works. If your lines are crisp and tight, this works. There are a few tricks though. First you need to get the line art layer to all black and white or as close as possible. Sometimes you might need to use Image > Adjustments > Threshold to do this but using Levels might work as well. I like using Threshold though but then after awards you may need to go in with the pencil and close in line breaks that might occur. Then you duplicate the line art layer and use the flatting plug in. I just leave it on the default settings suggested on their own site - and it works. It fills in all the closed in areas with their own color and then you just go in with the paint bucket and replace. Between this and still playing around with a cel shading style, I've been able to more quickly do some color pieces and enjoy doing so.