Awesome tutorial! Animator here who's a fan of hollowknight and was curious - here's some tips for folks trying this at home: - Bare minimum number of fps you need to make an animation appear smooth to your eye is 24, so you can also choose to set your animation to that FPS if you want something really fancy - Animate on 2's instead of 1's to have a more stable and less jittery animation. In normal terms, that means have your drawings be 2 frames long, instead of just 1. Also means you cut the number of drawings you need to do in at least half. Reserve 1's for very fast movements. - please, god, PLEASE use the timeline animation in photoshop instead of frame animation. It works more like a video editor such as premiere, letting you drag out the length of different clips & such very easily, rather than having to copy them to an entire new frame, and manipulate separate layers of animation at the same time. (meaning you don't need to do something like copy the head, just transform it vertically to bob up and down Have fun and happy animating! :)
@@MrXlee1967 Not for photoshop unfortunately since I've graduated and lost access to adobe software, but honestly there's already a lot of excellent tutorials out there for animation! Just searching up 12 principles and "how to animate in x software" will get you good results on youtube. (Also to be completely honest I'm not comfortable making video tutorials, this is my personal yt channel)
@@binaktivamkoten2173 Ayyy I'm glad it did!! It was some of the stuff we learned day 1 of my uni program ^.^ (Though nowadays post-grad I'm like "run as far from adobe as you can" lol)
Thank you so much! A ton of tutorials don’t explain as well, not to mention that since I’m just starting out the export process has been a struggle. Thanks for the in depth tutorial, you earned a new subscriber
Great tutorial. Well explained, and I have been using Photoshop for years and never knew how the Pen tool worked nor did I know about expanding selections... That's a process improvement for my workflow! However, I have 1 tip. Skip the reference dot for pivot point. Instead, simply set the pivot point on the first image wherever you want it, then, (since all the images are the same size) copy and paste the X/Y pivot point coordinates to the new images. This is much easier, and will give you better, more consistent results, and you won't have to worry about getting rid of the dot after. Cheers. :)
For those in 2021 version, and cannot see the samples, go to the top right of animation window, then click on the three dots, and then click show samples
Hey well look at that. I have been following Blackthornprod and admire his workflow but thought you need a drawing pad.... you have introduced a tool a programmer can actually draw with...a mouse. Thank you for taking the time and sharing this.
Thank you! The red dot is so you can set a pivot point for your animation. If it's not in the exact same spot every frame then the whole thing won't be smooth.
Thanks for the video. New Follower I want to ask: why not create vectorial characters in a dedicated software like Illustrator? And why do not animate in Adobe Animate (for example)? it looks like Photoshop is a tedious process and prone to error while enabling/disabling layers
Great video, I hadn't thought about editing with the pen tool so that helps the workflow and quality a ton. I do have a question tho: in Unity, since the sprite frames are all the same size (300x500px), could you just copy/paste the X position and Y position of the pivot from the first frame? I haven't tried this but it could help eliminate the red dot step and re-export.
hey thankyou! The unity sprite editor auto crops to the smallest dimension. Pretty sure it's because we are exporting to png and losing the transparent layer information. Each frame has a different size. There might be a better way around this but what I did with the red dot is just a quick solution I found myself!
Hi. I understand that it is better to draw the character twice as large as the resolution of the game. If you want it in 4k, wouldn't it be better to draw it twice that size and then make it smaller? Thanks a lot.
But what if i want it in that position like hollow knight ? Should i start directly to draw it from the side ? Or better all poses from behind front and sides ?
Very good video. This size to create the character will come in handy for smaller screen resolutions starting from 4k as the first option? I don't know if lowering the resolution of the character would still look good. Thank you.
I was thinking about this issue too. In that sense, it's better to draw in Illustrator which is vector. Can scale it to any size and will always look perfect. But I find the outcome way less appealing so I'm really struggling which way to go with this. Photoshop -- nice with textures etc. More organic. Illustrator: practical, vector.
I'm getting a gray outline on my sprite after importing it to Unity, I'mfinding that it's the slightly opaque pixels of the outer edge of the outline. I was wondering how I could fix this?
If you are still having this issue, select all frames inside your Unity project, go to Inspector > Advanced and check "Remove PSD Matte" option. This should remove the outline around your sprite
If the character is similar to the character of another game, then there may be copyright issues? It's just that I also made a character similar to Hollow Knight...
Whoa this is so easy to follow. I do like to hand draw my characters though, could this be achieved by drawing my character with my drawing tablet instead of using the mouse and pen tool? Maybe if photoshop has a vector pen tool?
@@gamesbygrigg7447 hey thanks for this i tried this but that also doesnt seem to work I think part of the reason is I am working in photopea which is kind of an online version of photoshop since I cant pay for it rn but would you know any way I could download photoshop for free ?
I would suggest using Krita, it is a free and open source digital art editor with tons of brushes and tools. You could also use Gimp, but I don't think it is as easy to pick up and go with. Hope this helps!
@@gamesbygrigg7447 I'll join now, I'll be home in a couple hours. I'm making my first game ever and I'm hella excited 😁 I worked on it for three hours last night and just barely got to the first step of animation last night 😅😅😅 my character also may possibly look like a 6 year old drew him lmao
Why would I do this rather than just draw the parts in? The video does not explain the benefits of what seems to be a cumbersome process in creating the head.
I think it's so you can animate it easier since you just have to move the points around and retrace and fill it, instead of redrawing it frame by frame.
@@gamesbygrigg7447 damn that was quick. I was thinking if I should buy something like that for 2d art. What do yo think about getting a tablet for ding 2d art in general?