Animating with Photoshop 1 - 14/11/2023

-

In today's session we experimented with animating a basic animation of a ball bouncing using Adobe Photoshop 2023. This was meant to server as a basic introduction to animation by learning the basics of squash and stretch, tweening, in-between frames and other aspects of animation. To animate the ball we utilised a template provided by the AngryAnimator.com website, which provided the guide for how to animate the ball.

The first step was to use the ellipse tool in Photoshop to create a perfect circle and place it over the initial frame of the animation. To actually animate within the programme we made use of the Timeline tool included with Adobe Photoshop, which for all my years of using it I hadn't discovered until now. We chose to animate at 10 frames per second to make the work today a little easier, and kept our workspace relatively small, at only 12 by 6 centimetres. When animating the bouncing of the ball we made sure to have the circle set as a Smart Object to keep it's look fairly consistent during manipulation, and used Photoshop's Distort tool to stretch the ball as it fell, made impacted with the ground, and bounced back up again, making it thinker or wider when appropriate. This technique is used to make an animation look more fluid and expressive, instead of staying completely static the entire time.

One I finished animating the ball itself, we then created a simple background for our ball to bounce within, as well as adding a bit more colour and detail to the ball itself. One that had been done, our next task was to create a shadow under the ball as it bounced, which I did by creating a simple ellipse under the ball coloured entirely black, using keyframes to change it's opacity as it bounced higher and lower to the ground in order to give a sense of depth and distance to the animation. Our final task was adding simple text to the animation reading "Don't be late!" as the animation ended, being encourage to also animate the text itself somewhat. For this I created a simple animation of the text spinning as it faded into frame once again using the Timeline's Keyframe feature, and so with this my animation was complete.

While this exercise today was fairly simple, I still found enjoyment in going back to the basics of animation I learned some years ago, also discovering that Photoshop has inbuilt animation software I thought was restricted only to After Effects and Animate. Hopefully what I've learned today will help me not only produce higher quality artefacts as my work at the university, but also aid me in creating better personal projects far faster than I thought possible before. Below is the end result of today's session in the form of a gif exported from Adobe Photoshop.



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storytelling and Gaming development timeline and doccumentation.

-
Image
The purpose of this blog post is to outline the development, creative process and progression of my Storytelling and Gaming assignment for my second year second semester at Hertfordshire University. While I understand that the assignment brief requested a series of blog posts to be created over the duration of the project's development, I neglected this aspect of my work out of no fault than my own, due to already having to maintain a seperate blog for my Independent Project, and on being told prior that the final end product was the most significant component of what we present. I appologise for the unprofesional nature of this stand-in blog post, though shall do my best to use this blog post to deliver a cohesive timeline of events. CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT My choice to have the style and asesthetic of my storytelling project to be in the form of a retro-esc videogame introduction cutscene game both from my enjoyment of the style of introductory cutscene I wished to make, as well as...
Read more

Animating in Photoshop 2 - 17/11/2023

-
Image
 Today in Photoshop continuing onward from our bouncing ball project, we moved onto more complicated animation, namely being the animating of a simple walk cycle. To do this we used a template from AngryAnimator.com as a base for our initial animation. Below is shown the template we used for our initial animation. To animate our person taking each step we first separated each part of their body into their own layer, the head, the torso, and front and back arms and legs. This was done to make animating far easier and to prevent unwanted squash when warping the limbs, additionally converting each layer into a smart object for easier animating . In order to make the arms and legs move we utilised Photoshop's puppet warp tool in order to establish joints on the arms and legs to manipulate and animate. One again using Photoshop's timeline feature we created a 25 frames per second animation of the walk cycle. After that was complete we then created a background for our person to walk...
Read more

Animate Future Stories Piece Documentation

-
Image
 For my Adobe Animate project for our Future Stories assignment I chose to do a rendition of the 3 Little Pigs story modified to be an educational interactive story for children about Internet Safety and Password Security. My initial design process was done by drawing out the designs for the characters, the story structure and the movement of assets in animate in Adobe Photoshop, which can be seen below. The wolf was designed to be more angular, mainly made up of triangles to signify danger, also being a harsh red colour with yellow added on his ears and grin. The three pigs all share the same base body structures, but being colour coded and with different shaped heads, each chosen to signify the stability of each pig's house, or in the case of my story, passwords.  The first big has a circular head and is sacredly, with circles not being very stable shapes. The first pig is also a light blue colour to represent their general sad attitude and passiveness. The second pig is squ...
Read more