Photoshop & Painter Tutorial : How to Draw Manga

This tutorial guides you through the process of drawing and colouring a manga picture. Manga artwork often suffers the unfair stigma of appearing all the same. Although there are general stylistic conventions, every artist interprets it differently, creating a host of unique styles. The more you draw, the faster you will discover your own style, both in character design and colouring. The colouring technique outlined here was done in Photoshop CS and Painter IX.

Word from author "I also used a graphics tablet, which is an invaluable tool for anyone going into digital art. Wacom tablets often come with a free version of Painter Essentials. Although it’s not as good as the full version, the effects demonstrated in this tutorial can be re-created (with a bit of practice) in Painter Essentials.
I like to sketch and ink by hand, then scan the outlines and colour them on the computer. Great care should be taken over the sketch because it forms the backbone of your work. Even the best colouring technique won’t be able to salvage a poor, out-of-perspective drawing. When sketching, I check for mistakes by holding the drawing up to a mirror. Inking is done in black ink, with a thin fineliner or nib pen. When working digitally, my files will most likely be in PSD format (to support layers). The final image is then flattened and saved as a TIFF or JPEG (at least 300 DPI). TIFF is better quality for print. JPEG has a very small file size, making it suitable for pictures on the web."

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Maya Tutorial : Basic Walk-Cycle

Although other rigs can be used as well, this tutorial is intended for you to use the “Walking Ball” character setup created by the author. This tutorial is intended to teach new animation students a few basic animation techniques and workflow based on fundamental animation principles using Maya and a free character setup named walkingBall_v2.3 created by the author. This character setup or “rig” has many useful features without being overwhelming to newer students. This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of how to navigate the Maya interface, find menu commands, and
other basic computer file management skills.

This tutorial also assumes you are somewhat new to 3D software and animation concepts.
We will be using a basic pose-to-pose approach of animation. Pose-to-pose animation is what its name implies, creating character movement by establishing primary positions, or poses, and methodically moving the character from one pose to the next. Different, but just as valid methods such as straight-ahead or layered animation are not described in this tutorial.

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Blender 3D Tutorial : Walkcycle Animation

Turn a simple walk cycle into a stroll with style! Improve your character animation in our Blender masterclass, which makes use of genuine rigs from the movie Elephants Dream BY BASSAM KURDALI.
walk cycles are one of the staples of 3D character animation. Yet it’s all too easy to end up with bland, robotic movements. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a walk with personality, keyframing and refining a basic movement cycle, then layering secondary animations over the top.

For this, we will use Blender’s NLA Editor (Nonlinear Animation Editor). It works just like a video editor, but using animation ‘strips’ instead of video clips. Each strip represents instances of an action that can be moved, scaled in time or layered on top of other strips. This allows you to create an action that contains one walking cycle, while the strip itself contains as many cycles as are required for your character to walk along the path you have assigned to it. The repetitive nature of the cycling can be offset by using additive action strips to alter the motion, or by adding other strips to layer different actions on top of the walk.
In the tutorial, we’ll be using Proog, the lead character in the world’s first open source animated film, Elephants Dream. First, we’ll keyframe a basic walk cycle and make the action loop properly, then put him on a path and add some actions and layer animations on top of his walk. Finally, we’ll look at some of the extra cloth animation controls the character rig contains. Don’t worry too much about Proog’s coat until the very last step of the tutorial – to look good, it needs some hand tweaking. The walkthrough is intended for readers who already have some familiarity with both Blender and the basic concepts of animating a walk cycle. If you get stuck, refer to the annotated screenshots on the CD. The disc also contains a set of numbered scene files that will enable you to pick up the tutorial again at the corresponding steps, and more are available for download from www.3dworldmag.com/stoppress.
The Proog model itself is the genuine rigged character from the movie, and is available under a Creative Commons attribution licence, so it can be used for any project you like.
Most of the tutorial can be completed in Blender 2.41, which is included on the disc. However, some of the advanced steps require Blender 2.42, which should be a free public
download from www.blender.org by the time you read this.

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Flash Animation for Beginners

In this "Flash Animation for Beginners" tutorial we will learn how to make a simple Flash animation of the direct fluorescent antibody technique. Because of time constraints we won’t have time to cover how to make original drawings using the Flash drawing tools but rather will use images I have previously drawn. In addition, we won’t be using stop and continue commands to run the animation but rather will be using timed text inserts. However, instructions for inserting “stop” and “continue” commands will be included in this handout.

"Flash Animation for Beginners" Contents :
Introduction : The Macromedia Flash Screen, Drawing or Importing Objects, Converting Objects to Symbols, Converting a Frame into a Keyframe, Clearing a Keyframe, Adding Frames, Deleting Frames.
Beginning Your Animation: The Direct Fluorescent Antibody Technique: Positive Test : Moving the Animation Title Text On to the Stage, Add Unknown Antigen (Bacterium) to the Animation, Add Known Fluorescent Antibodies to the Animation, Moving the Fluorescent Antibodies to the Antigen, Wash Slide to Remove Unbound Antibodies, Showing the Known Antigen Fluorescing, Ending the Animation, Publish and Play the Animation.
Other Bells and Whistles : Moving an Object Along a Path, Scaling an Object, Tweening Color During Motion, Tweening Transparency During Motion, Using Buttons to Play, Stop, and Continue, Publishing a Flash Animation in a HTML Web Document, Publishing a Flash Animation as a QuickTime Movie.
Your Next Animation: The Direct Fluorescent Antibody Technique: Negative Test.
Sample Animations.
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Flash Animation with ActionScript 3.0

Pushed for time? Deadlines looming? Learn to copy tweened animations to ActionScript and you can save yourself hours of effort. Your motion tween can be as long as you
like, provided it s on a single layer. It can contain multiple tweens and keyframes, as well as blank and hold keyframes. Animated filter effects can also be included, as well as Alpha and scale effects. You can capture the motion of a number of Motion tween properties. These are: Transformation point, Colour, Skew, Scale, Rotation, Position values, Filters, Custom easing, Cache as Bitmap setting, Blend modes, Position, Orientation to motion paths, Frame labelling and Motion guides.

In Flash, keyframing animations and producing motion tweens can be a laborious process – particularly if you have to create the same style of animation over different movie clips across several Flash movies. This can be a massive drain on resources. It's a case of going back to the drawing board and starting the animation again.
Or is it?
One of the best features to come along in Flash CS3 is the ability to copy tweened animations to ActionScript 3.0. This way, youre able to take your finessed animation efforts and convert the animation to ActionScript code. This code can then be reapplied to any Flash movie clip – in any Flash movie. An instant time-saver in only a few clicks. Sounds too good to be true? Well dont worry, theres no catch: just a straightforward technique that could put you ahead of the game when it comes to delivering client creative. Read on to find out how to put it into action.

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