Well, this was one of the easier things that I have made, well, it was only easy once I understood how in the world I was supposed to do it. I’m also a musician, I play the guitar and the piano, and one thing that I could never seem to get right was the timing that was needed to play the song. I’ve always have, and I still do, struggle with that. And it seems that the problem followed me into my animation endeavors. Creating a motion tween looked really easy watching others do it, but trying to get it to repeat itself without making it look like it was jumping across the screen was a much more difficult task than I had previously anticipated it to be. Anyway, the end result was satisfying to say in the least, I know I had fun with it.
THE PROCESS
I first made a new document that was just a copy of the walk cycle that I had uploaded recently, and then I needed to resize the entire canvas to make the mini-me smaller so that I would have room for the environment. I increased the document size to an outrageous size in order to make it look normal, because I was NOT about to go through every single frame, on every single layer, and re-size it to a smaller ratio. Anyhow, I next created the first part of my world that would be moving/the foreground. I opened up Photoshop and I used the brush tool to make myself a path. I then separated it into 3 similar segments so that it could repeat itself.
I next opened up Illustrator, and I used that program to use its splendid pen tool to make myself some taller grass for the middle foreground.
It took me a while to get those two to match up when the animation would repeat, but with a lot of time, and a lot of patience, (and a lot of help from me teacher) I finally got it to look the way I wanted it to.
Next I needed the middle background, and i decided to go with mountains, because I love the mountains that I live on and I spend most of my time there in the summer. I once again relied on Photoshop to do the trick. I separated it into about 6 segments so that it would take longer for the animation to fully cycle, thus giving the illusion of motion and perception.
The background was the easiest one, I needed 7 repeating segments to make it move the slowest, but it also looked kind of goofy due to the fact that it was just the same few clouds over and over again in the sky. I didn’t have the time to come up with a solution, so I just left it how it was. Hopefully, I can come back to this one day and make it much better.
I then just plopped in a light blue sky behind it and there you go! I had myself a Hotshot Hike.
Digital Artisan 