Hello and welcome to this Citizen Course on Creating an Animated Character Splash Screen!

Hello everyone and welcome to this Citizen Course on creating an animated character splash screen in Photoshop and After Effects. In this course Tim Von Rueden and Daniel Goslin take you through the steps on creating a animated splash screen from the initial sketches to adding in dust particles in the final render.

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This has been a new and up-n-coming trend seen in a lot of video games lately, especially during the login screens. Being a LoL player myself, I’ve been wanting to create one of my own and after confirming with Dan, I wanted to show you guys how to go about creating your very own screens as well! Since this course is focused on the creation of setting up a splash screen on the concept side, the character that is used has a full 6 part series on how to fully draw her and can be found here: Red Character Series.

As a Citizen member you get access to the complete streaming course, including all project files and the ability to download each individual video. To make this series more accessible you now choose to either stream or download any of the videos. To stream the videos, simply click on the thumbnail for that portion and it will automatically load at the top of the page.

The resources in this course include the following: The final .PSD with all the named layers, the Sketches .PSD, and the Course After Effects file. Citizen members can also download each part’s HD video.

What you’ll learn in this course

During the first half of this course, I will take you through creating a Photoshop file ready for animating in After Effects. This will include explaining both the character and environment being used for this course and how to treat the different layers you will be created to work properly. When creating this scene, always be thinking about what you want animated and how you should be separating the layers from each other.

From there, I will hand the Photoshop file with all the layers properly named over to Dan. He will then give an introduction to using After Effects and then get started on integrating Character motions such as breathing, blinking etc. and then work towards the effects of the character like flowing hair and holding the box at different angles. After the character is finished, then he takes a look at adding different background elements like the leaves falling, glowing lights, fog, and dust particles.

With this course you will have the basics to go out and complete your very own animated character splash screen!

Note: the first three videos including the final splash screen are freely available for anyone to view to help give you a better preview of the course, Enjoy!

The post Citizen Course: Creating an Animated Character Splash Screen! appeared first on CG Cookie.

Creating Custom Pivots in Unity

In this Unity Cookie quick tip, we’ll take a look at creating custom pivots. You can’t directly manipulate pivots in Unity. You can either choose to transform an object using it’s center or pivot, but you can’t change the pivot. Most of the time this is not an issue as you’ll be working with 3D content from your 3D application and Unity will respect the pivot position as imported from the 3D object. However, there are times when you are working with native Unity objects where you need to adjust or create a new pivot.

Using a parent pivot object will allow you to not only create a custom pivot, but will also allow you to place a transformation at a higher level such as when you might need to separate the rotation and position transformations. This is common in camera follow scripts.

Drawing Gizmos

In the video, I also talk about helper scripts that use the Gizmo class. I use the Gizmo class often in my project to create helper editor objects when building my games. Here is the code mentioned in the video to draw a simple wireframe sphere in the editor.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Gizmo : MonoBehaviour {

	public float gizmoSize = .75f;
	public Color gizmoColor = Color.yellow;

	void OnDrawGizmos()
	{
		Gizmos.color = gizmoColor;
		Gizmos.DrawWireSphere(transform.position, gizmoSize);
	}
}

The post Creating Custom Pivots in Unity appeared first on CG Cookie.

The Quick Tools Add-on Improves Workflow With A Series Of Shortcuts and Macros

Blender offers a very powerful and fast workflow for many different tasks, but sometimes improvements can be made. Using the multitude of Blender add-ons available we are able to alter and improve the way we work in Blender.

In this case, the Quick Tools add-on is an extension developed by yours truly that offers a set of easy-access menus in Object mode, Edit mode, and Sculpt mode. These menus contain a series of commonly used tools and custom macros that work to speed up repetitive tasks.

Once enabled, you can access these menus from the 3D Viewport with the Q key. If you wish, you can change this hotkey easily from User Preferences > Input > 3D View > Object/Edit/Sculpt.

Download the Quick Tools Add-on

You can download the latest version of Quick Tools HERE.

Bug Reporting

If you stumble across any bugs in the add-on please submit a bug report via the Issue Tracker on our GitHub Repo: https://github.com/CGCookie/script-bakery/issues?state=open

The post Using the Quick Tools Add-on appeared first on CG Cookie.

Modeling and Rigging with Modifiers

Though a spiraled chord is a simple concept and perhaps an afterthought when considering to model a phone, it can prove to be a tricky object to manage.  Luckily with Blender’s Screw and Curve modifiers spiraled objects are both easy to model and easy control.

What You Will Learn

1. I’ll show you how the Screw modifier allows a minimum amount of mesh input to generate a perfect spiral of any length and any frequency.
2. Using the Curve modifier we can attach our spiraled mesh to a bezier curve.  This gives us the ability to contort our chord with perfectly smooth curvature while maintaining the spiral nature of the geometry.
3. Then I’ll explain how Hooks can be used to manipulate the control points on a bezier curve without being in Edit Mode.
4. Finally I will incorporate the spline into an armature that can be used to animate the phone and the chord.

The post Rigging A Spiral Phone Chord in Blender appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn to animate a line draw using the Line Renderer Component

I recently worked on a project where I needed to draw a line from one game object to another. That is easy enough to do using the Line Renderer component, however, I wanted to animate the line renderer moving from point A to point B. In this video quick tip, I show you how I accomplished this effect with just a small bit of scripting.

Finding a position along a line

The key to animating the line is to calculate a position along the known distance of the line and feed this updated position to the line renderer component’s “SetPosition” method. You do this in the Update function.

To calculate the postion along the line, I used the following steps.

1. Get the unit vector in the desired direction
2. Multiply by the desired length
3. Add the starting point.

In order to actually animate the line, I increment a variable that is interpolated between 0 and the known distance of the line. The interpolation is handled by using Mathf.Lerp.

The post Animate a line draw using Line Renderer Component appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn how to use Dynamic Topology Sculpting in Blender

The dynamic topology system in Blender allows for a much more organic, creative sculpting process. It gives you much more flexibility in not only how, but what you sculpt by not limiting you to the original starting basemesh.

When working with dynamic topology, Blender will automatically tessellate the mesh under your brush stroke to account for the detail needed. This gives you the ability to add detail anywhere you wish, create new forms, and work with a much more optimized polycount since the tessellations are localized.

Check out CG Cookie Citizen for more sculpting training

To learn more about using dynamic topology in your workflow and creating finished sculptures I recommend you check out Kent Trammell’s training series on Creature Modeling For Production, and his Citizen course on Hard-Surface Sci-Fi Weapon Sculpting.

The post Introduction to Dynamic Topology Sculpting in Blender appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn How To Retopologize Complex, Hard-surface Forms in Blender

Through the continued improvement of sculpting tools and workflow we now have a lot of different ways we can choose to model a subject. A perfect example is Kent Trammell’s training series that looks at how to use Blender’s sculpting tools for creating a hard-surface weapon design. The techniques Kent uses rely on the dynamic topology feature, allowing Kent to create most anything he can imagine. However, these techniques and workflows don’t generally result in models that are easy to work with through the rest of the production pipeline. Dynamic topology, and sculpting in general, result in very high-resolution models that may have beautiful forms but they’re challenging to texture, render, or do much of anything with. This is where retopology comes into play.

If the retopology process is a mystery to you then this is ideal for you! Unlock the complete course by joining Citizen

Retopology is the process of recreating an existing form with a clean mesh structure that accurately represents the original form. This process is often used to yield a animation or render-ready model that’s not only easier to work with, but may also have cleaner surfaces that give the artist more freedom in the remaining stages of the complete workflow (such as texturing, shading, and rendering.)

What you’ll learn through this course

Building on Kent’s previous series, Sculpting a Sci-Fi Weapon, this Blender course will take you through the retopology process for that final sci-fi weapon model. Among other things you will learn:

• How to break the model down into key forms
• Modeling methodically to get more control over the mesh
• How to easily add sharp details with proximity loops (holding edges) and edge creasing
• How to use surface snapping for fine mesh control
• How to use the Shrinkwrap modifier for better visibility
• How to use the BSurfaces add-on as a retopology tool

Music by: FortyTwoMusic, Airtone, septahelix

The post Hard-Surface Weapon Retopology in Blender appeared first on CG Cookie.

See How to Rig your Characters with Rigify

Rigify is an automated rigging tool written by Nathan Vegdahl that makes the character-rigging process fast and simple.

If you’re like me, you spend most of your time in Blender modeling and texturing characters for still renders.  However, sometimes I want to see my static character spring to life in animated motion.  So the anticipation and excitement builds enough for me to venture into the rigging realm, motivated by lofty dreams of character animation! Though hours later I end up raising a white flag in a confused and frustrated surrender to the often overwhelming task that is rigging.

For Blender users out there who experience similar rigging inabilites Rigify is the answer to your character animation needs.

What You Will Learn

1.  Enabling the addon.

2. Customizing the meta-rig to achieve the best performance from the generated rig.

3. Generating the rig.

4. Automatic skinning your character model to the rig.

5. What Rigify doesn’t do for you.

Music:  “The Universe and My So-Called Life” by Pitx

The post Quick Rigging With the Rigify Addon appeared first on CG Cookie.

Hello Everyone and Welcome to this step by step tutorial on creating an Urban Warrior with Ivelin Trifonov.

He is a fantastic artist that works some great stuff with lighting and interesting characters. He was generous enough to show us his process in creating a modern style character. Below is a .gif of the finished step step tutorial.

Ivelin Trofonov:

1. I always start with a fast sketch of the character, trying to capture his posture and movement.

2. Here I start marking the main volumes, lighting and making sure the character is standing solid on the ground plane. I work with broad brush strokes, defining the main shapes and masses.

3. I continue defining the shapes of the figure with broad brush strokes, and establish a basic background. Still working in black and white.

4. It is important to constantly flip the picture – like that we ensure a fresh look over the painting. I put on the hero’s clothing.

5. In this phase, I start working in details over the ”warrior”, and bring forth the enemies  he is fighting with – old TV’s

6. Coloring time – I create a new layer with blending mode set to Color. Doing this I keep the values of the painting, while adding colors to it.

7. Adding textures – usually I put them over the whole painting on multiply or overlay layer mode and play around with the opacity. I start developing the main focus of the painting – the face of the hero and a part of his shoulder, illuminated by the TV screen.

8. I make some color corrections and in the same time continue polishing the painting.

9. I start adding some elements in the background – a few silhouettes of buildings, trying to establish a depth in the picture.

10. I add some life in the TV screens by adding a blurred image over them.

11.Final touches – adding last details, final color corrections and voila! – my “Urban Hero” is done!

Thanks for checking out this step by step tutorial with Ivelin Trifonov.

The post Written Tutorial: Urban Warrior appeared first on CG Cookie.

Learn how to automate tasks in Blender with Python scripting

There are lots of things we do over and over again in a normal workflow. It might be that you need to add and apply a modifier to a hundred objects, or change the display traits of many objects, or any other repetitive task. These things add up quickly and increase the time it takes to finish our project. Luckily for us Blender has a complete Python API  that allows us to access most of Blender’s tools and settings via scripting.

Python scripting in Blender is straight forward and relatively easy to learn but it can be very confusing if you don’t know where to start. In this tutorial I will take you through the process of writing a very simple script that allows you automate adding and applying Subsurf modifiers to all your selected objects.

The techniques you’ll learn in this tutorial can be applied to many, many different tasks in Blender. I am only scratching the surface of Python scripting in Blender in this tutorial.

 What you’ll learn:

Below you can see the final script that you’ll be learning how to write. I’ll be showing you how to write it and what each part is.

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene
selected = bpy.context.selected_objects
object = bpy.ops.object

for obj in selected:
    scene.objects.active = obj

    object.modifier_add(type="SUBSURF")

    for mod in obj.modifiers:
        if mod.type == "SUBSURF":
            bpy.context.object.modifiers[mod.name].levels = 2
            object.modifier_apply(apply_as="DATA", modifier=mod.name)

Find more scripts

You can check out more scripts from the CG Cookie Crew via our GitHub repository: https://github.com/CGCookie/script-bakery

The post Task Automation with Python Scripting in Blender appeared first on CG Cookie.