Designing the Key Poses

Inkscape Video Tutorial

Why do we need them? Designing the key poses will allow checking the character and making sure it works. Can’t I just animate the character. Yes, you can. A game character usually comes with a whole set of animations. There is the idle, the walk, the run, the dying sequence, a jump, a shoot, a getting hit, etc. All these parts depend on the same graphic elements. Therefor, it’s helpful to create some key poses before going into the animations. They give you an idea what the character will look like in the main moments of the animation. Are the legs long and dynamic enough to make his jump look fun or his run fast? Is there enough length in the arms to swing a sword or shoot a bow? All these issues can be checked and fixed beforehand.

Let’s get back to out little game project. The important parts will be the run, jump, shot, get hit and die poses.

Note:
Here we go. You asked for it. Even if it took some time to convince an old dog to learn new tricks, here is my 1st video tutorial. I guess it’s really just about being used to my step-by-step tutorials. Setting those up has become a routine. The video on the other hand came with a lot of challenges. It’s very rewarding to overcome the issues, work out some [not all] of the problems, and finally see the finished video out there. I know there is a lot of room for improvement, so bear with me. I hope to get there (eventually). 

Let’s start setting those up

Finally, I had fun doing this. It does take a little bit of getting used to. I should probably script my tutorials before I record them. Basically, lacking the time and trying to keep it simple, prevented me from doing it. I might have to look into it again in the future. This won’t be the last video tutorial for sure.