I finished two videos today. I decided to be lazy and skip the completion of the staircase as I had just finished all of the line work and reeeeeaaaaaallllllyyyyyy want to just say fuck it and install elevators. I'm going to follow through though and get that taken care of tomorrow more than likely. I'm going to be applying the same wood technique as I did to the gate, but more than likely not as detailed. I decided to do the gate because it needed to be done and I didn't want to do the stairs. For the most part aside from some dynamic lighting, rigging of things, and adding simple aesthetics such as torches and perhaps symbols or flags it is finished. I'm going to do the bricks on the main wall and when I do that I'm more than likely going to make minor tweaks to the gate to give the image depth rather than the illusion that everything just fits perfectly.
I'll be taking requests for specific items or pieces of scenery if anyone has issues with them and would like to see how I would go about drawing them and detailing them.
I'm not particularly good at drawing trees, but I was thinking about adding a few to this to give it a nice feel.
Original post:
So this is going to be an animation that I'm going to be working on, but right now it's just a background that I am working on.
I'm more than likely not going to post WIP threads for the actual animation, but some flash animators around here seem to be having trouble with line work so that's the reason I've recorded my progress with this.
It's nothing over the top, but it will teach you some tricks to doing things suck as brick work, shading, and accuracy when making symmetrical line work with dynamic angels. God knows if you aren't using 3-D software or AutoCad then that's going to be extremely tedious haha.
Anyways, here is a screen shot and the video that I've increased the speed out of. If you have any questions just ask.
The quality is very low, sorry about that. I'll post several screenshots.
The final product. I'm going to do more brickwork with this to allow for a more realistic look rather than just a flat color. The way it was designed is so during the actual animation not inside this tower you won't be able to see the inside, but I will be able to alpha it out when/if the characters go inside.
This is the inside of the tower so far.
This was when I was doing the brickwork. Basically you cannot have the bricks aligned equally both vertically and horizontally, so I divided it up with black and red lines and on each row I either deleted every red line or every black line, depending on which color the row was going to be.
This is the top of the tower. I didn't want to make it aligned with the VP, fuck that. So what I did was I found out how many points I wanted to have and used the polystar tool to create the shape (That's what the O-30 is there for, in case I forget lol). Once the shape was created I just drew lines from the center to the points on each well, point, and then transferred it over and modified the size. The trick to doing something like this is to change the line color and increase it's size so that it will be on top of any smaller lines. It makes it a lot easier to work with a whole lot of overlapping lines and being able to keep your place. The 15^ is another marker I used to set how many shifts I used on that one line. That's going to be important to know later down the road when I arch the tower.
I've added stairs and a front gate. This will allow me to do more epic shit with movie clips and show you all how to do some kick ass wood graphics rather than copying a bitmap into your flash file. The reason I wanted to go ahead and do the stairs and front door is so that I knew how to align the tower up with the stairs that way nothing would look off because in reality the stairs would be intersecting the tower. Looking at it now I kind of want to delete the blank half and make the entire thing completely symmetrical. It would be awesome in terms of animating and doing it quick so I'm sure that's what I'm going to do.
Tomorrow the first thing on the agenda is to group the sections together, as I only have like five layers right now. That's never good when dealing with this many segments, but since I sort of have everything color coded it won't be an issue to separate everything.
I hope some of you can find this somewhat useful lol.