Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) uses machine learning algorithms in order to create content. This content can take multiple forms such as images, 3D models, audio, text, animations and more. Generate AI took the world by storm in 2022 with popular applications such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and Mid Journey.

Stable diffusion examples from the official repository

The advent of generative AI has unleashed a new wave of creation and change that is already impacting all aspects of our lives. This includes, of course, the process of game making.

How does generative AI work?

In non-technical terms, what these models do is essentially mathematical operations in huge matrices of data. These models are called neural networks (for an example of the simplest possible neural network, the Perceptron, see this tutorial).

In order to use a generative AI model, that network needs to be trained. Training is the fine-tuning of the model’s parameters so that it can give us the results we are after. The training of these models requires huge amounts of data – in some cases, pretty much the entire internet.

This is actually not AI-generated. It’s a stock image we paid to be able to use a while back.

The largest models such as those created by OpenAI cost millions of dollars to train, however that cost has been steadily coming down, with the open source Stable Diffusion model costing “only” $600,000  to train.

The fact that the whole internet is the training set for these models can explain why they are able to generate assets not only in the majority of art styles known to humankind, but that they are also able to create work that is “in the style of” niche artists (some of which are, understandably, not happy about it).

What game assets can we create with generative AI?

At this point in time, some of the main applications that have been made available to the broad public are the generation of 2D images, text and computer code.

There are, however various other applications in the horizon that are currently being showcased by large tech companies such as Google and NVIDIA, AI researchers, startups and hobbyists. These include textured 3D models, animations, video and audio (voice and music).

What’s the vision with generative AI in games?

This is, of course, pure speculation. In a non-distant future, it is likely that we’ll be able to generate entire games based on a prompt. For example, we might be able to write “create a platformer game taking place in Santiago, with a horror theme and packed with people-eating potatoes, pixel art, medium difficulty, with retro music”, and obtain a playable demo of such a game, with assets, a storyline, and source code.

Prompt “low-poly rainbow dragon”

Not only will we be able to create new games with AI, but those games will be able to adapt and respond to the players in ways that were unthinkable today, to the point where they could be totally different to each player based on their gameplay and preferences.

Also, generative AI has the potential to bring the cost down for what today is only possible with +100M budgets and huge teams. This would be a huge leveling in the playing field in the industry, but not without many other consequences that we’ll talk about later.

What is a more immediate application of generative AI?

An immediate application of generative AI is in the creation of game content. That is, an AI might be able to create new levels, characters, dialogs, music, quests, within an existing game.

It’s important to mention that a lot of this is already possible using procedural generation and other techniques. With all the buzz around generative AI, the fact that a lot of this is already possible has been somewhat forgotten, so it is common these days to see articles mentioning this as if it was the first time that it was possible.

Using procedural generation, we are already able to create not only levels but entire galaxies (see No Man’s Sky and other games in the genre), as well as textures, animations, storylines and much more.

So what is generative AI able to add here? Well, quite a few things. From the developer’s perspective, procedural generation level, while certainly a lot of fun and easy to get started with (see our Procedural Generation course), does become complex as you scale the number of variables and aspects in your game.

The procedural generation of other game content like textures and audio can be highly complex from a mathematical standpoint. It is much easier and quicker for iteration to tell an AI “undulating sand”, than it is to implement and finetune a terrain generation code.

While procedural generation can do a lot, it is more time-consuming and complex, and therefore, expensive, than using AI prompts, that’s not where the advantages of AI end. With generative AI we can also pull from a much larger catalog of resources and can provide our games with infinite more variety. There are, certainly risks to it as we’ll cover in a bit.

Another benefit of this technology, in particular for game development enthusiasts who don’t have a design/art background. I believe that those developers will really benefit from generative AI.

I’ve personally stopped working on personal projects once I had to look for textures and 3D models, as you end up in an Asset Store-induced choice paralysis kicks in. With generative AI, it is quick to get some decent-looking graphics into your personal projects and continue making progress.

Will generative AI render game developers and designers obsolete?

Only a few years back, people were saying that no-code tools were going to render developers and designers obsolete. All of the sudden, anyone could create websites with the likes of Wix, games with GameMaker or apps with App Inventor.

What ended up happening though was not what had been predicted. As no-code tools made it easier for people to create prototypes, that did indeed reduce the need for developers/designers in a super early stage. But when the cost of production was reduced, the cost of user acquisition increased. If you have 10x more apps wanting people’s attention, that is bound to create a more competitive landscape.

What tends to occur next is that in order to win this race, your app, game or product needs to differentiate, which by definition, cannot be easily copied, and again, that pretty much implies that you’ll need to push those no-code tools to the limit in which they break (meaning, you either need actual code, or the no-code project is large enough to require software engineering best-practices, or it needs a human design element that the tool itself cannot provide), and voila! you need developers/designers to take it from there.

I’m providing this example from the entrepreneur’s perspective, but think of this same dynamic taking place across companies of all sizes that are competing for customers. Winning customers attention and wallets is often a zero-sum game. That tends to create a complexity arms race that will push players out of the comfort of the no-code tools and pre-made designs.

Where am I going with this? When generative AI becomes pervasive, and everyone can generate a AAA title with a prompt, why would I want to play the game that such and such generated, when it’s not gonna be better than what my “no code” AI tool can do? We’ll the way to make a game more interesting will be to add developer/design value on top of what the AI can create, in order to make it different and more distinct.

So in summary, yes, I expect that they (we, I should say) will still be needed, provided we all learn to add value on top of what generative AI tools can offer.

What are the main risks when using generative AI in your game?

The largest risk by far is that of copyright. Firstly, a disclaimer. I’m not a lawyer and none of this is legal advise. Copyright is generative AI’s elephant in the room. As somebody with no conflicts of interests here, I can appreciate both sides of the argument.

An artist not being compensated for the use of their work is not fair or appropriate in modern society, especially when their works are driving billions in revenue. There are already lawsuits taking place.

Prompt “trial against an ai inside a court of justice, with a magistrate and robot witnesses, 4k photo realistic style”

On the other hand, the pro-generative AI argument is that human creativity is built on what others have created in the past, including “training” our brains with other people’s work. There is unlikely to be a single professional artist on Earth who has never seen (and therefore, registered in their neurons) another person’s work. What generative AI has done is turn this existing process into an algorithm.

The courts and society will need to agree on a framework for AI training that takes everyone’s interests into account. I suspect this will be ironed out one lawsuit at at time.

In saying that, should be careful when using generative AI. If you generate a “Mickey Mouse surfing” image, is that yours or Disney’s? While I don’t know the answer to that, it is not something I’d dare to put into question. It is easy to avoid using works that you are familiar with, there could be copyrighted content in your AI-generate images without you knowing it.

What I would recommend is to do an Image search of the assets that you generate with AI, if you are looking to use them commercially. Again, none of this is legal advice, and empty Image Search results are no guarantee of the absence of copyright.

Regardless, generative AI is here to stay. The open source code is already in the wild, and people can always choose to train an AI with their own work, or with work that is already in the public domain.

What’s the main usability issue with generative AI?

Customization, customization, customization. This is where I’ve struggled the most in my own forays into the different tools.

It’s easy to write prompts and create say an elf character in vector art, but it is not that straightforward to then take that exact elf and generate different poses or reuse those characters in other prompts, or to remove the background for a clean sprite sheet.

Prompt “elf warrior character in vector art for videogame”

There is a lot of work being done on these fronts, but it is still not easy or quick to do. I’ve noticed a similar thing when it comes to the art style and color palette. In the future, I’d like to see the ability to set a design tone, color palette, etc, and that the AI or the software built around it is able to distinguish the different entities and characters (example ability to generate a character, and then to have a “jumping animation” for that same character).

In terms of easiness of use. I’ve seen several startups build web-based tools to create game assets, including Scenario and Mirage. They are all doing an amazing work in the space in terms of improving the experience for game developers and designers. I’m super excited in seeing how this new ecosystem of products takes off.

As a personal take for usability, the way I would actually like to use this is inside my preferred game engine. When Probuilder was added to Unity, I ditched Blender for most simple things. I find it easier to keep my workflow in the Unity editor itself. Likewise, with generative AI tools, I’d like to be able to generate this assets directly within the game editor, the photo editor or the 3D modeling tool, and not to have to use more services. This might be a very opinionated view, but regardless, the minute Unity and the other engines have some of this in-built, most people will be too lazy to use other websites unless they really have to.

So, what is an aspiring video game maker supposed to do once they have the idea? This is where the story of game design begins, a fascinating subfield of game development that is crucial to the entire process.

In this article, we’ll explore what game design even is at the very foundation, how game design exists as a career, and help you understand why it is so critical to the world of game development at large. We’ll also provide you with a ton of resources so you can learn the “how” of game design too and apply it to your projects!

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Defining Game Design

In this first section, we’re going to take a look, first and foremost, at what game design is at the most base of levels. This will not only establish a good foundation as we explore how video game design functions as a career, but also help out beginners coming in not quite sure how to define it!

What Game Design is

Game design can be considered the planning arm of the entire process for making a video game. No video game gets made without a plan, and video game design is, more or less, the process of making that plan. The field is somewhat a hybridization of creativity and technical skills that combine into a cohesive, fleshed-out idea that people can work with using concrete and actionable tasks.

However, that is a lot to unpack, so let’s break everything down a bit more in layman’s terms.

Creative Side

As mentioned, all video games start with an idea. This idea can simply be something like:

• “I want to make a platformer where the princess is the player character.”
• “I will make a choice-based story RPG set in a Lovecraftian-inspired world.”
• “I think it’d be cool if there was a one-hit kill battle royale video game.”

What the idea is doesn’t particularly matter, but the point is that these are the sparks that kickstart the game design. From there, though, this idea is not enough yet to make a video game. Instead, we’re left with a lot of questions:

• What does the princess player character look like?
• How are “choices” presented in the video game – dialogue or implemented in the gameplay itself?
• How can a one-hit kill video game be balanced for fun rather than frustration – and is it multiplayer or singleplayer?
• What sorts of weapons and/or items are available in these video games?
• Do these video games have some deeper story?

We can certainly go on and on with these questions, yet what you may not realize is answering these questions is a large part of what game design is about! These are the exact elements that help you design the game – from the characters and plot, to the design of the levels, to the mechanics of how the video game is played, to the expression of the mechanics in a way that is fun, and even to aesthetics. Every little aspect like this must be answered, and game designers are the ones to do just that.

In essence, they take that base idea, and create a narrative out of it – just a specific one that helps elaborate on what elements need to be decided on and made piece by piece to make the whole puzzle of a video game come together.

Technical Side

However, as creative as this might all sound, we can’t neglect to elaborate on why video game design is also still a technical field.

On the one hand, most game designers are actually expected to know a bit of programming, computer science, and math. While in bigger teams they might not be expected to program at all, they do need to have the background knowledge to oversee the game’s production. After all, if a programmer on the team makes something that doesn’t test well, the game designer is going to have a hard time communicating the technical problem unless they are familiar with the game’s construction.

So, having the necessary technical background will, at the very least, make communication easier as you polish and finetune the game design.

This is not to mention that many different game genres require pretty intense math and balancing. For example, if you’re making a city-building strategy game, you need to be able to plan costs, plan resources, plan timetables for construction or resource gains, and so forth. This will need to be tested, rebalanced, tested again, rebalanced again, and so forth. In order to do these tasks, as well as make the initial formulas, a strong understanding of math is needed.

Beyond this, game design can also be a lot about some of the humdrum business aspects as well, including things like planning the game around the target audience.

For example, according to GameRefinery, while realism is the preferred graphic style in the west for mobile games, Japan prefers anime-styled art across the board for their video games. So, depending on which market you were targetting, the art style choices of the game design might change drastically given that. While definitely not the most creative, these still are important factors to consider during the planning process.

Summary

Overall, game design is one part creativity with deciding the atmosphere, story, and aesthetics of the video game, and one part technical know-how deciding game mechanics, balancing, and so forth. Game design is a robust field of study that involves just as much knowing how and why to do a certain thing as it is using your imagination to create novel possibilities.

However, no matter which side you talk about, game design is about creating the initial plan, knowing the tools and techniques to create that plan, and how that will dictate how the full game comes together as one experience. This is a concept that surpasses many other aspects of video game development, such as even what game engines to use.

Differences from Game Developer

Before we move on to talking about game designers as a professional career, let’s stop for a moment to talk about the elephant in the room. In other words, how does a game designer differ from a game developer?

This is a tricky question, as it depends on each game designer’s personal situation, some nuanced technicalities, and the exact context in which each term is used. However, we can try to break it down as best we can.

First and foremost, most game designers can be considered game developers. Rather than being entirely separate, game design can be considered a subfield of the entire video game development process. Generally, even for something like a UX/UI designer for a game, these subfields still encompass people considered to be game developers at the heart of the issue. Certainly, they have specialties, but they’re still part of the development team.

That being said, when most people are using the term “game developer”, they are generally speaking not of the specific subfields, but of the general programmers who work with the designer and plan out the super technical aspects like data structures, objects, and so forth. It’s also assumed these developers have a good grasp of computer science in comparison to other specialties.

We go more into depth on the entire field of game developer in this article, but the important point here is the context of how the terms are used generally refer to different things entirely – one about planning and one about programming.

Then again, it is worth pointing out that in the indie sector, where many video games are solo developed, the game designer can also be the sole “game developer” in charge of everything. As such, there is some huge crossover in activities. No game is made without a plan, so someone at some point has to do the game design.

All in all, though, the best way to navigate the world is to focus on game design as a specific subfield rather than focus on the differences. At the end, everyone involved in making a game is an important member of the game development process.

Game Design as a Career

Now that we understand what game design is, let’s dive into the actual practice of it as a career in the gaming industry. Even if you’re only interested in video games as a hobby, this still may be a worthwhile section to explore just to get an understanding of a game designer’s everyday life – as game design is not all fun and playing games. It may also give you some insight into what awaits you should you make that critical decision to start this career path.

Activities

To begin, we’ll start by talking about the sorts of activities a professional game designer might do in the gaming industry as a whole. With your new understanding of game design, many of these will be no surprise.

However, before proceeding, let’s establish one thing: every game designer, video game, and game development studio is different. Some activities on this list a video game designer may never touch depending on the makeup of the team and what the video game is (as different types of video games need different things), whereas others might do all of them and then some. So, be sure to consider this when deciding if this is the right career for you or not!

• Script/story writing: If a story is involved with the game, a game designer might spend a lot of time working on those aspects. This includes establishing the setting and history, establishing characters and their backstories, planning out the narrative plot, and potentially writing all the dialogue that will be used throughout the game. In larger teams, the game designer may simply coordinate with dedicated writers to get some or all of these various aspects done. Nevertheless, a game designer will often be intimately involved in getting the story off the ground.
• Planning and creating game art: Part of a game designer’s duties is to decide the game’s aesthetics. This can include creating basic character designs, environment visual designs, and so forth. Technical decisions will also be made here, such as whether to do pixel-art, 3D graphics, etc. Now in some cases, a game designer will make a basic concept, which they then turn over to a professional game artist to flesh out into a usable piece for relay to asset creators. In other cases, the game designer’s own art may serve as the final concept art from which the game assets are made.
• Designing levels/puzzles/challenges: One thing almost all video games have in common is that there are “levels” – i.e. spaces where the game is played. Even if a single-level game – for example, a fighting game stage – every block, aesthetic, and critical path will be planned out by the game designer. This can also include planning out battle encounters, puzzles, and similar should the specific game call for that. Besides planning, a game designer may also be one of the main members implementing the levels into the game by placing assets and so forth – allowing them to tweak things as they go to create the best game possible.

• Planning interfaces: If there is no dedicated UI/UX designer on the team, guess what falls to the game designer? Whether an inventory screen, some sort of video game encyclopedia, health and hunger bars, or even simply a text score, all these interfaces need to be planned to exist, placed strategically, and have their aesthetic design decided on. Game designers will spend a huge amount of time designing this aspect, as it is one of the main ways players interact and receive information from a video game.
• Developing gameplay: As mentioned earlier, one of the main things video game designers do, even more so than the activities above, is decide on the exact mechanics of the game and how it is played. Even if it’s just how fast a player character jumps, a game designer will serve a critical role in deciding these aspects. This process usually begins with a game designer writing a Game Design Document so everything is laid out, whether for just them or for a larger team. From there, a game designer will tweak the design further so every minute detail presents well and feels good as a player plays through the game.
• Collaboration and communication: Depending on team size, another activity video game designers might do in the professional world has to do with both collaboration and communication. In the previous activities, we discussed how in some cases, a video game designer may delegate certain tasks to specific specialists. When that is the case, a game designer will spend a lot of time communicating and collaborating with those team members to make sure everything created – whether that be art or the programming itself – fits the specifications of the design. GitHub is a tool that makes collaboration easily, as it allows you to communicate with your team and implement version control.
• Programming: Once again, this activity depends entirely on the situation. However, many game designers do participate at least somewhat in the programming activities of the video game. This can range from very literally doing it themselves, to simply helping out other programmers and overseeing certain technical aspects so it is a match for what the designer intended. At the very least, some programming knowledge is helpful even if you don’t do it, since some aspects of game design are reliant on the technical limitations.
• Testing and changing: Finally, and a big one for video game designers, is testing and changing the video game they’re working on. Besides being fun, video games at their heart are supposed to have a consistent, quality experience. Game designers will spend a long time testing every aspect of the video game to test how it feels to play, whether there are any mechanics that are broken or ruin the competitive nature of the video game, and so forth. Once those issues are discovered, they help tweak the game design until the final video game product is the very best it can be as far as the core design goes.

Job Outlook & Salary

While job availability will always vary depending on location and experience, game design can be a lucrative career to get into. According to Career Explorer, the United States alone has nearly 300,000 positions for game design. Their sources estimate that this will grow from 2016 to 2026 by 9.3%. Other sources, such as DegreeQuery which gathers information from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, put the job growth anywhere from 4% to 10% depending on specific data used.

These sources also indicate that game designers who specialize in mobile games will often have more ample job opportunities going forward.

On the salary front, even junior designers can expect to earn quite a bit. Without considering specializations, the job sites below reported the following salary ranges for game designers in the US:

• PayScale: $40K to $103K (Average of $66,362)
• Glassdoor: $65K to $$113K (Average of $85,772)
• CareerExplorer: $47.4K to $172.1K (Average of $90,270)

Salaries might also vary greatly by company. For example, PayScale shows Bungie having the lowest salary for game designers at $61K, while Age of Learning, Inc. and Electronic Arts both pay over $85K for their game designers. Experience can also play a big role, with developers seeing an average of $10,000 more per year for every 1-5 years more experience they possess.

As you can see, though, game design is both in-demand and a profitable field to pursue. Further, game design can be even more profitable as you specialize, especially for things like UI/UX design.

Becoming a Video Game Designer

By this point, not only should you have a good idea about what game design is, but also maybe you want to become one now – whether that means joining a professional AAA company or simply solo-developing some video games as a hobby. Whatever your ultimate goals, though, we’ve compiled some of our tips and resources to help you take the first steps on this amazing journey and master game design!

Get the Technical Skills

We’ve long since established that game design is not just about having creative ideas – it’s also about technical skills and knowing how and why to do certain game design things (not to mention knowledge of computer science).

So, obviously, the first step here is to get some technical skills and master the basics, both of game design and its many facets, and of programming. We’ve broken some helpful tutorials and online courses below to get you started on your journey.

Programming

• Best Programming Languages to Learn to Code by Lindsay Schardon
• What is Coding and Why Learn to Code?
• (Premium) Python Mini-Degree by Zenva
• (Premium) Full-Stack Web Development Mini-Degree by Zenva
• (Premium) C++ Programming Bundle by Zenva
• (Premium) Mobile App Development Mini-Degree by Zenva
• (Premium) Unity Game Development Mini-Degree by Zenva
• (Premium) Intro to Programming Bundle by Zenva
• Python Tutorial for Absolute Beginners by CS Dojo
• (Premium) Intro to Coding with Python Turtle by Zenva
• How I Would Learn Javascript FAST in 2023
• (Premium) JavaScript for Beginners by Zenva
• C# Basic Series by Allan Carlos Claudino Villa
• How to Program in C# by Brackeys
• C++ Programming All-in-One Tutorial Series by Caleb Curry
• Zero-Day Java Guide by Mohit Deshpande
• Swift Tutorial Series by Mohit Deshpande

General Game Design

• (Premium) Intro to Game Design by Zenva
• (Premium) Game Design Academy by Zenva
• (Premium) Level Design for Beginners by Zenva
• How to Make a Game by Daniel Buckley
• How to Design a Game: Game Design Documents by Tim Bonzon
• Basic Principles of Game Design – by Brackeys
• 7 Must Read Books for Game Designers
• Game Design Document Template – by Game Dev Underground
• Our 50 Favorite Game Design Tutorials by Game Designing
• The 6 Steps to Create Your First Game
• Game Design Process: Designing Your Video Game by Ask Gamedev
• 51 Game Design Tips! (In 8 Minutes) by Jonas Tyroller
• How to Improve Game Feel in Three Easy Ways by Ji-Young Kim

Game Art

• (Premium) Game Artwork Academy by Zenva
• (Premium) Intro to 3D Models with Blender by Zenva
• (Premium) Intro to Pixel Art with Photoshop by Zenva
• (Premium) 3D Models in Unity with ProBuilder by Zenva
• (Premium) Texturing models in Unity with Polybrush
• Unity Animator Tutorial – Comprehensive Guide by Tim Bonzon
• A Guide to Handling Huge Worlds in Unity by Renan Oliveira
• Unity Animation for Beginners by Tim Bonzon
• 5 Steps To Making A Gorgeous 2D Game by Thomas Brush
• Making Concept Art Character Designs for A Video Game! by The Poncho Pilgrim
• Things To Know About Game Art and College by DeepFriedPaint
• Game Design School: Character Design by Pixel Pete

Game Writing

• (Premium) Storytelling for Games by Zenva
• How to Approach Narrative Game Design by Cypress Reeves
• So You Want to Write for Video Games? by Ken Miyamoto
• How to Become a Video Game Writer
• A Practical Guide to Game Writing by Gamesutra
• The Three Pillars of Game Writing – Plot, Character, Lore by Extra Credits
• How to Write a Cinematic Story for Your Game
• Storytelling in Video Games by Brackeys
• How to Make a HIT Indie Game (Story-Driven) / “The Formula” by PieNinjaProductions

Make a Video Game

Once you have the basics down, the next step in the journey to becoming a game designer would be to simply put it in practice and make your own games (in any of the popular game engines).

This not only allows you to practice your skills, but also lets you build a portfolio which is crucial if you’re trying to get hired. Plus, as we’ve established above, game design is an expansive field that is about game mechanics, UIs, and more. So the more opportunities you put each aspect of game design into practice, the more you’ll find what works from you.

Below we’ve compiled some of our favorite resources that will help you make your first video game. Keep in mind, we’ve also included some non-computer games in this list as well, since game design principles (like good mechanics) are still as relevant to board games, card games, and so forth. Also, don’t forget to expand past these tutorials as well – game design is about experimentation!

• (Premium) Create Your First 3D Game in Unity by Zenva
• (Premium) Create Your First 2D Game in Unity by Zenva
• (Premium) 2D & 3D Games in Unity by Zenva
• (Premium) Survival Games by Zenva
• (Premium) 2D RPGs by Zenva
• (Premium) 3D RPGs by Zenva
• (Premium) Strategy Games by Zenva
• (Premium) HTML5 Games by Zenva
• (Premium) Godot Games by Zenva
• Unity 101 – Game Development Foundations by Zenva
• Build a Road Crossing Game with Unreal by Daniel Buckley
• Create a Unity FPS in 3 Hours by Zenva
• Create a Unity RPG in 4 HOURS by Zenva
• How To Create A Game Using JavaScript by Dani Krossing
• C++ Tutorial 18 – Simple Snake Game by NVitanovic
• Java Programming: Let’s Build a Zombie Game #1 by RealTutsGML
• How to Make a Game by Daniel Buckley
• Coding for Kids: Languages and Project Ideas by Lindsay Schardon

Conclusion

By this point, we hope you have a good idea of what game design is. Game design is an essential component to all games no matter how large or how small. Without game design, projects would fall through quickly. With a concrete plan, though, any developer can bring a project into reality.

Additionally, game design is recognized as an important position in larger companies, with high salaries and a need for the in-demand skillsets involved. It is not just thinking of ideas, but understanding how to logically and systematically arrange those ideas in a way that produces a fun game.

All this being said, we’ve only just scratched the surface here. There are a lot of skills involved with game design – from understanding how to guide players, to understanding high-level concepts like game loops. However, with the resources provided, you can definitely dive deep into the field and even join the video game industry. Maybe you’ll even make the next hit game.

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You can access the full course here: UV Mapping in Blender for Beginners

UV Mapping

In this lesson, we’re going to see how to map our texture onto our object in Blender.

Start with a new cube as the only object in your scene. Go to the Material tab in the Properties window and add a new material. Select its base color to be white and apply the metal texture you’ve downloaded from the course files to it:

To move the texture around or scale it we’ll be using UV mapping. Go to the UV Editing layout, on the top bar, then for the object window select the ‘Material Preview‘ mode:

We can see all six faces of the cube laid out on top of our texture on the left window exactly as they are being displayed on the cube to the right.

If you go to the ‘Face select‘ mode, you’ll see where each particular face is located in the texture image:

In the texture window, we also have a face selection mode and if you select it you can move the faces around the texture image by pressing G:

We can scale a face up by selecting it and pressing S:

You can also press A to select all faces at once and rotate them by pressing R:

Notice that when we move one of the cube’s faces all faces near it get distorted. To avoid that, we can disconnect the faces from each other by changing the selection mode to ‘Disabled‘ in the dropdown menu at the top left corner:

Now we can position the faces freely on top of our texture:

So basically UV mapping unwraps our object for us by converting it from a 3D object to a 2D image so that we can lay it on top of a texture that our object will sample from. When exporting your model the UV mapping applied to it will be carried over automatically to the exported file.

Note that you can replace the texture image used with any other whenever needed. The UV mapping remains unaltered once the object will continue to sample from it in the same way previously arranged.

Transcript

Welcome back, everyone. In this lesson, we are going to have a look at UV mapping. So first of all, I’ve got ourselves a cube right here. I’m gonna go ahead over to the Materials panel. I’m gonna go ahead and create our material.

And I’m gonna set the base color to be an image texture here. I’m then going to apply a texture to this object right here. I’m gonna give it a, let’s give it a metal texture like this one right here, okay?

Now what happens if, for example, we want this part of the metal texture to be over here, or we want the texture, in general, to be scaled down, scaled up, moved around?

Well, in that case, we can look at UV mapping. So up at the top, you’ll see there’s a bunch of different layouts. We have Modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing, and that’s the one we wanna go to. So I’m gonna click on UV Editing right here. And what you’ll see is two windows.

On the right-hand side, we have our scene view like normal, and it set us over into Edit Mode. And on the left-hand side, we can zoom out here, and you’ll see that we have our texture laid out right here.

And on top of that texture, you’ll see we have each face of our cube. So we’ve got our six faces of the cube laid out on top of the texture right here.

And on the right-hand side, for example, if we go over, click on Material Preview up at the top right so we can actually preview the material, what we can see is if we go into face edit mode and we select a face, you’ll see that face gets highlighted here on the left-hand side.

If we select another, that one gets highlighted, and so on. We can press A to select all the faces. And on the left-hand side, if we then go up to the top left, and just like in Edit Mode, we have Vertex selection, Edge selection, and Face selection.

If we select Face selection, we can click on a face here and move it around. So if I select a face and I press G, you can see I can move it around. And look what happens on the right-hand side.

As I move the face around on the left-hand side, the area of the texture of which it is sampling from, in which all the other faces are sampling from, changes, okay? So as I move it around here, you’ll see it sampling from a different part of the texture.

And you’ll see it’s also getting stretched. Some of these cubes are getting stretched, so that’s why we do have that weird warping happening, but yeah. As you can see, this is basically how UV mapping works. We get a 3D object and we unwrap it, okay?

We basically convert a 3D object into a 2D image that we can then lay on top of a texture, and whatever texture is underneath it is the pixels that it is sampling in order to display on our screen. So for example, we can select the middle one here, press S, and we can scale it up.

So it’s sampling a much larger area, whereas these faces over here, we can scale it up. And as you can see, the texture is getting smaller, but if I scale it down, the texture is getting bigger because the area it’s sampling is changing. We can also rotate things.

So I can press A here to select all of it. I can press R and rotate it around like so. And as you can see, the texture is being rotated. Okay, so we’ve got that there. Right now we’ve got our cube. Now when it comes to cubes, they’re pretty simple objects.

They’re one of the most sort of simple 3D objects you can have, so unwrapping this sort of thing is fairly simple, okay? In fact, it does it automatically for us right here with each of the individual faces.

All right, so we’ve got a UV here on the left, but you’ll notice that when we select a square, for example, let’s just say we want to sample this face down here somewhere.

Well, if we select that face and press G to move it, you’ll see that it drags all the others with it and it just distorts it not in a nice way. So how can we, for example, get this face and sort of disconnect it from the rest so we can move it freely around?

Well, in order to do that, what we want to do is go up to the top left here and you’ll see there’s a little dropdown next to where we can select Vertex, Edge, or Face. And we wanna click on that, and there’s three different things. We have Disabled, Shared Location, and Shared Vertex.

This basically determines, when we select a face, how is it gonna modify other faces? And we, of course, wanna go to Disabled as that basically means now we can select any face here, press G, and move it around without any of the others being connected to it, okay?

Whereas before, if we were to click on one, it would sort of move the other vertices around as well. Whereas now, we are free to move these around wherever we want, rotate them, scale them, just like so, okay? And that is how we can do UV mapping inside of Blender.

And of course, when you go to export this model, all of the UVs are automatically baked into the model itself, so it will all be carried over. And you can even replace it with any other texture you want.

So for example, if you go into a game engine and you no longer want a metal texture, and instead you want some other texture, the same UV map is going to apply, okay? So you have this square image right here.

And no matter what texture you put on here, these exact UVs are always going to be here until you change them inside of a 3D modeling program like Blender ’cause it bakes this information into the model itself.

Now in the next lesson, we are gonna go over the process of unwrapping multiple different objects, okay? So I’ll see you all then in the next lesson.

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You can access the full course here: UV Mapping in Blender for Beginners

Texturing an Object

In this lesson, we’ll learn how to texture an object inside of Blender.

Included in the course files (go to the ‘Course Files’ tab below the video to download) there are two textures available for us to use. They are sourced from a great place to find free textures, the ambientCG website:

Before we start, delete everything from the scene collection and start afresh by adding a new cube mesh to the scene. For that, go to Add -> Mesh -> Cube at the top left of the scene window. Then open up the Material tab in the Properties window. Click in ‘New‘ to create a new material that’ll determine how our mesh will be rendered. Name it ‘BaseMaterial‘:

We want to set the base color property but to see its effects we need to change the way Blender is displaying our scene. Right now we’re on the ‘Solid‘ viewport shading which is basically this silver shading that’s covering our object, let’s switch to the ‘Material Preview‘:

Let’s make the base color white so our texture won’t be influenced by it:

To do that, make all RGB (Red Blue Green) values equal to 1.

Note that next to the ‘Base Color’ option there’s a yellow dot which in Blender means that we can add in something. Blue dots stand for vectors (that is, properties with multiple values) and gray dots are used for single values. Click on the yellow dot and select ‘Image Texture‘:

We see that the cube turns black because there’s no texture applied. However, now there’s an ‘Open‘ button below the base color property that you can go to and locate the texture file you want to use. Applying the rock texture we have:

If you export the cube in the FBX format the texture will be automatically exported along with it so you can add it to the game engine of your choice.

Transcript

Hey everyone and welcome. In this lesson, we are going to be looking at how we can texture an object inside of Blender.

Okay, so let’s just say you’ve created a 3D model and you want to apply a texture to it. So how do we do that? Well, let’s just say already you have your texture and you want to apply it. Now included in the course files, I have two textures right here that we can use.

Okay. One of them is a metal texture, like so, and the other is a rock texture like this one. And these are sourced from a website called AmbientCG. Okay, this is a public domain website where you can have a look at hundreds of different physically-based rendered textures with all the different maps that you may need.

Okay, so if you’re looking for a great place for free textures, AmbientCG, it’s public domain, it’s totally free to use. Okay. And that is where these two textures are sourced from. So how do we get an image like this, for example, and apply it to a model here in Blender?

Well, what we need to do is let’s just say, for example, we’re just gonna apply it to our default cube. So I’m just gonna start off by deleting everything here, adding that cube back in, so we don’t have the light or the camera in our way.

I’m gonna select the cube, and then over inside of the properties window here, I’m gonna go down to this little button, which looks like a red sphere. Okay. And this is our material window.

Now what we wanna do is click on the new button right here and this is gonna create ourselves a brand new material. All right. And a material is basically what determines how an object is rendered, okay? What sort of shading has been applied.

So that can involve, for example, the texture that is the base color, how shiny it is, how rough it is, how metallic it is and all sorts of other things that Blender, of course, provides but game engines might not.

So we’re not gonna be looking at that in too much detail, but what you can do is you can double click on the material here to give it a name. I’m just gonna call this base material.

And down here, you’ll see there are a bunch of different sliders and options that we can change. But what we want to do is go over to the base color.

Now, if I click on this here, I can, of course, change this color to whatever I want. But you won’t notice that the cube is doing anything, right now it is still this default gray cube. So how do we actually see these changes of the material? Well, in order to get that, we wanna go to the top right corner here, where there are four different buttons.

And these buttons right here are basically different ways of viewing our scene. So right now we are on viewport shading, which basically means that there’s a universal gray shading applied to everything.

But what we want to do is go over here to the material preview, which is right next to it. You wanna click on that and as you can see, our cube is now blue, and we can go ahead, change the color to whatever we want.

I’m gonna reset this back to white, so I’m just gonna set all the values back to one here, just so when we apply our material there won’t be any tint applied to it. We can change all sorts of things, such as how metallic it is.

We can change the speculars or how large or how small the specular highlight is, the roughness, so if it’s really reflective or if it’s not very reflective, but how do we apply a texture to this?

Well, if you scroll over here, you’ll notice that there’s no, you know, there’s no button that says ‘apply texture’ or there’s no field for us to drag and drop a texture in. What we need to do is go over to base color right here.

And what you’ll see is there is this yellow dot. Now in Blender, whenever you see a yellow dot-like this, it basically means that we can plug in something, okay?

Everything here has a dot for example, you have a yellow dot, you have a blue dot, you have a gray dot, blue dots are vectors, okay? So they are basically multiple values. For example, a location is a vector, a rotation is a vector.

And a gray dot basically means a value, okay? So a number, for example. The metallic, that is a number that can range between zero and one. So that is a gray dot, whereas something like a mission or base color that allows us to plug in an image, it allows us to plug in a texture.

So what I’m gonna do is up at base color here, I’m gonna click on this yellow dot and you’ll see this window pops up. And this basically allows us to choose which sort of texture we want to apply.

Now, we’re gonna go pretty simple here. We’re just gonna go over to image texture, select that one. And you see right now is pretty much black because we have no texture applied.

But what we can do then is click on the open button, which has now appeared. And we want to basically select our texture. So I’m gonna navigate over to the folder where the texture is located. Here it is right here.

We got the rock color, I’m gonna select it, click ‘open image’ and as you can see, that rock is now applied to the cube. Okay? So we now have this texture applied to our cube.

And if we were to export it, add to our game engine, as long as you export as an FBX, the texture should come along automatically with it, so that should be no problem right there.

So, yeah, that is how we can apply a texture to an object here inside of Blender, but you will notice that, you know, the proportions might be off.

For example, you might want this part of the rock over here, you might want this face to be a different part of the rock texture, and that is where the system of UV Mapping comes into play.

Now, UV Mapping is what we’re gonna be looking at in future lessons, and basically that allows us to determine which part of the texture gets rendered on which part of the 3D model.

So, adding a texture like this is fairly straightforward yet when it comes to UV mapping, that’s where we will be spending most of our time as there are many different methods of how we can go about doing it because different objects require different forms of UV mapping, but we’ll be going over a wide range of those.

So thanks for watching and I’ll see you all then in the next lesson.

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You can access the full course here: Intro to 3D Modeling with Blender

Proportional Editing

In this lesson, we’ll learn about proportional editing inside Blender.

Let’s first create a flat surface by going to Add -> Mesh -> Grid.

Set its size to 10 to make it a bit bigger in the popup window at the bottom:

Switch to edit mode:

If you want to keep it flat like this, you actually don’t need this many faces as it would slow performance down. However, we can modify the individual vertices.

In this context, we’re going to use proportional editing to smooth these transitions out.

The icon for the proportional editing is a dot at the top of the scene window (you can also use the shortcut O):

Next to it, there’s its falloff type which is set by default to smooth.

When moving your selected vertex up, use the scroll wheel to set the area that’ll have the proportional editing applied to:

The bigger the circle more vertices will be moved up as well, while the vertices further out will be less affected.

Note that it produces a shape very similar to the one indicated on the icon at the top menu:

Feel free to explore the other several falloff options, such as ‘Random‘:

You can apply the proportional editing to several vertices at once too, just as edges or multiple faces:

Creating a Terrain

As a challenge, try coming up with a basic terrain in a new grid that is 100×100 in dimension, with mountains and peaks surrounding the borders.

Let’s make it have a size of 50. Then, select a few vertices to  have smooth falloffs like so:

Select other points now to make some sharp mountains:

Lastly, for a final touch, we can add some more points of random falloffs as follows:

And here we have a nice terrain that you can use in your game as a background.

Transcript

Hey everyone, in this lesson, we are going to be going over proportional editing inside of Blender. So, first of all, let’s just go ahead and create ourselves a flat surface.

So for example, if you’re creating a game and you want to make some terrain, or if you want to sort of add a bit of blending between the vertices, so for example, we can go up to add mesh and then we’ll go down to grid.

And what grid does is if we open up this little dropdown, we can specify how many X and Y subdivisions there are. So right now it’s on 10 and we can keep it like that. Let’s just make the size a bit bigger. So we’ll make it a size 10. So it’s a bit of a bigger grid here.

Now, if I go into edit mode with tab, you’ll see that we have a lot of basically slices, okay? So this is a square that has been sliced up a bunch of times.

Now, if you’re just keeping it flat like this, then you probably wouldn’t wanna have this many faces as that would be quite performance-heavy, but what we can do then is modify the individual vertices.

So for example, I can modify these vertices here and you’ll see that it moves it up. I can move it around, I can scale it. The scaling doesn’t really work on one vertex but yeah, you can see then I can basically modify these vertices but it doesn’t really smooth out to the others, okay.

So I can, of course, go ahead, select multiple here. And yeah, as you can see, I can modify them, but you know, it doesn’t really, you know, smooth it off. So how can we, for example, move these vertices up and have a smooth transition around it with all the others?

Well, that’s where proportional editing can come in handy. So at the top of your screen, you’ll see there is a little dot icon right here, which is proportional editing with the shortcut O.

So we can click on that and to the right of it, you’ll see basically the fall-off and this is basically the fall of curve. So by default, it’s smooth, there’s sphere route, inverse sphere, et cetera. So, let’s have a look first of all at what it does. So I can select a vertex, move it up.

And you’ll see that nothing really happens. But if I hold down left mouse and use my scroll wheel, you’ll see this circle increases in size. And this basically shows us which vertices are going to be affected when we move this one.

So if I make the circle about half the size of the grid and move it up, as you can see, the vertices surrounding this one are being moved as well. And you can see the further out, the less they have been affected, okay.

So the vertices closer to the one we have selected are been moved up more and the ones further out are being moved less. And you can see the shape it makes is very similar to this smooth fall-off curve here.

And so, for example, if you want is to be more of a, sort of a stretch up, we can undo this here, change this here to sharp, move it up and you’ll see it is more sort of pointy like a mountain.

We can also go ahead, change that over to linear, if you just want to straight, constant increase and decrease like so, and there are many others. Okay, there’s constant, which basically moves them all up in the same rate.

And if you’re working on terrain or you want a bit of randomness, you can click on the random button right here, and this will sort of give a random fall-off curve to each of these, okay? So it can add a bit of randomness and noise to your mesh.

So, when doing this, you can of course increase and decrease the size by using a scroll wheel at pretty much any time. Now, this also works. If you want to select multiple vertices, so for example, say we want to select a bunch of different vertices right here, and we increase those up, you’ll say, yep.

The exact same thing happens. We can also do the same for edges so we can select just a bunch of random edges here, bring them up. There you go. We’ve got a couple of different hills and of course faces too. So yeah, proportional editing is really good if you want to basically modify a group of vertices and have them sort of smooth out.

So this is especially good when creating a terrain, for example, mountains, if you want to create sort of rocks and have, you know, the sort of randomness even here, or if you wanna add in some sharp inclines to things.

Yeah, proportional editing is a great tool and something handy to always have in the back of your mind when working on game assets. All right, so, as a bit of a challenge, I want you to go ahead and create some basic terrain, okay.

What we’re going to be doing here is I want you to go ahead and create a new grid, but this time, instead of having 10 divisions on each side, I want you to have 100 divisions okay. So along the X and the Y axes, I want there to be 100 rows and 100 columns.

So you can do that by creating a new grid, and then surrounding the square here, I want there to be mountains, you can add a bit of randomness.

You can add some toll peaks, some short peaks, but just make it a train where in the middle we could place down objects for the player to walk around in and see mountains in the background, okay. So, I’ll be right back to see how you done.

All right, so I hope you had a go at that challenge. Pretty much, we just wanna go add mesh, go down to grid. You can set the X subdivisions to 100, same thing for the Y. We probably might wanna also increase the size of tiny bit so let’s bring this up to 50.

There we go, if we go to edit mode now, you’ll see there is a lot of different faces right here. So, we can go ahead. Get our vertex selection right here and just start selecting some vertices.

So select one there, one there, one there, one there, we’ll even select some just add a bit of randomness as well here with vertices we’re selecting. And if we move it up, you’ll see that’s what we get there, but let’s change it to be sort of a smooth increase.

We can scroll your mouse wheel a bit until we get what we want, something like that. Then we can go ahead, select a few more vertices here, and then we might wanna change it over to sharp, bring this up and there you go, we’ve got a bit of a mountains here.

And then finally, we might wanna add some randomness to this. So, we can go ahead, select a bit more like here. And then what we can do is we can change the fall-off curve to be random here.

And we can then increase this a tiny bit, probably bring it’s down a bit more as quite a bit of randomness, something like that, there we go, and as you can see here, we’ve just quickly chucked together a quick little piece of terrain that you can chuck into your game as a backdrop.

So you don’t just have the standard skybox and flat ground that you sometimes see in games instead you can have a nice mountain range in the background. And then of course, later on, you can go ahead and texture and give it some color. So yeah, that is a look at the proportional editing tool inside of Blender, thank you for watching.

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You can access the full course here: Intro to 3D Modeling with Blender

Boolean Modifier

In this lesson, we’re going over Booleans in Blender.

First of all, let’s create two shapes.

Go to Add -> Mesh to create a cylinder and a UV sphere:

Press S to scale the cylinder up and place the sphere inside it as follows:

We’re going to use the sphere as a cutting tool in a way that we can have a spherical hole in the cylinder in the end.

Select the cylinder and go to the modifiers tab (the one with a wrench icon) in the Properties window.

Next, choose the Boolean modifier:

For the ‘Object‘ field, click on the eyedropper and click on the sphere to select it as the object we want to cut out of the cylinder:

Located at the top right corner of our scene window, the ‘Wireframe‘ viewport shading allows us to see precisely where the wire edges of the cylinder (in orange) wrap around the sphere: 

Go to the dropdown arrow and click ‘Apply‘ to perform the cut:

Select the sphere and hit the Delete key:

Attaching Objects with the Boolean Modifier

Let’s undo it all and add a brand new boolean modifier back on. Pick the sphere as the object of the modifier again and then select ‘Union‘:

Click on the arrow and hit ‘Apply‘.

Once we delete the sphere, we now get a modified mesh with the two objects merged:

Note that you can also have your resulting mesh from the intersection of these objects by applying the same process but choosing the ‘Intersect‘ option instead:

Transcript

Welcome back, everyone. In this lesson, we are gonna be looking at Booleans inside of Blender. So first of all, we need create two shapes. Let’s go add, mesh, and let’s go ahead and create ourselves a cylinder right here. So we can drag that over there.

Then let’s go ahead and add in a new mesh and we’re gonna make this one, let’s just say we’re gonna make it a UV sphere. Just like that. So, with our cylinder, I’m gonna press S to scale it up a tiny bit.

And with our sphere, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna move it inside of our cylinder, like so. Just not all the way in, but just enough so that we sort of have this cylinder intersecting… The sphere intersecting the cylinder like that.

So what we’re gonna be doing is we’re basically going to be using this sphere as a cutting tool. We’re gonna be using this sphere as a tool to basically cut out a bit of the cylinder so it leaves, basically, a cylindrical… A spherical hole in the cylinder.

So how do we do that? Well, we could, of course, go in with edge loops, extrusions, and all that, but you know, that’s quite messy. So a quick and easy way to do it is with booleans.

So I’m gonna select our cylinder here. And then in the properties window, I’m gonna go down to where we have this wrench icon. And he is where we can add modifiers.

Now in Blender, modifiers are basically these things that we can attach to objects in order to do many things. We can have a bevel modifier. We can have masking, we can have some vertex weight paints and all that. We can add physics. We can add in an armature.

So if you wanna have a character animation, you can do that. You can add fluid particles, pretty much anything can be done as a modifier. So we’re gonna go here, under generate, and select the boolean modifier.

Now, with the boolean modifier, it needs an object that it’s going to use in order to intersect it. So we can click on this little eyedropper icon right here and click on our sphere, just like that.

So now what’s happened is basically it has identified the sphere as the object we want to cut out of the cylinder. And you might not notice it just yet, but if we go up to the top right corner here, you’ll see there are a different number of rendering modes.

If we click on viewport shading, and we click on this wireframe, it’s gonna switch over to wireframe. And it might be a bit hard to see, but you can see here that we have the orange of the cylinder wrapping around the sphere.

So can switch back to the normal viewport shading here. And if we go over into our boolean modifier, and if we click on this little dropdown arrow, we can hit apply so those changes are made. We can then select our sphere, delete it.

And here you go, we now have a spherical hole inside of our cylinder right here. We can hop into edit mode, just like before, and modify it just fine. See yeah, that is the boolean modifier.

We can also attach stuff using boolean. So for example, let’s undo all of this right here. Undo the boolean modifier. Let’s add the boolean modifier back on. We can then select the sphere as the object we want to use.

And then what we can do is, right now, set a difference and difference basically means that we’re gonna subtract this sphere from the cylinder. We can also have intersect, which basically does the opposite.

So as you can see, it’s basically removed everything but what is inside of the sphere here. We then have union, which basically connects the two together. So we can apply the union, like so. We can select this sphere, delete it.

So now this sphere is now connected to this cylinder here. So yeah, that is the boolean modifier inside of Blender.

It’s a very powerful tool that you can use in order to connect two meshes together. You can also set it to difference in order to subtract one from another. So if you wanna create holes in meshes, for example, using booleans is a very good way to do that. And thank you for watching.

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You can access the full course here: Intro to Rigging Models in Blender

Preparing Our Model

In this lesson, we’ll prepare our model to be rigged.

To start off, we want to make sure that our model’s normals directions are all facing the correct direction.

As we flipped the left arm and leg to create their mirrored copies for the right-hand side, we also inverted these model faces which are now pointing to the inside of such objects (instead of to the outside).

To check it, select the left upper arm, press Tab to go into edit mode, then select the ‘Display Normals‘ option under the ‘Viewport Overlays‘ menu as follows:

We can see the normals as blue lines pointing outwards:

Press Tab and select the other upper arm. Press Tab again. You’ll see that no lines come out this time, but if we increase the size of the normals then we can see them pointing through from the inside. This means that the right-hand side of our model is in fact inside out.

With the right upper arm still selected, press F3 and then type ‘recalculate’ and select ‘Recalculate Outside‘. We see that the normals are now out as expected.

To speed up this process, let’s combine all our models into a single mesh by pressing A then Control + J.

Next, go into edit mode, press  F3, and go ‘Recalculate Outside‘ again to fix all normal directions at once:

Positioning the Mesh in the Scene

With a front view, press G (holding down Shift so it snaps) and place the feet on the red line like so:

Click on the Move button on the left menu to see the model’s pivot point:

We want to define the center of the model to be at the base of its feet. For that, press F3, type ‘set origin’, and select ‘Origin to 3D Cursor‘:

If we rotate our model, it’s going to rotate based on its feet.

Lastly, rename the mesh to ‘HumanoidModel‘.

We’ll start rigging our model in the next lesson.

Rigging – Part 1

In this lesson, we’re going to begin rigging our 3D character.

In Blender, the process of rigging is basically like creating a skeleton for a 3D mesh where we can rotate and modify the bones in order to rotate the rest of the mesh.

We have a center root that corresponds to the main bone of the structure and branches to the shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Similarly happens with the legs, and we also have one bone for the neck as well:

You can have more or fewer bones depending on if you want to rig each individual finger and/or toe joint, etc.

Inside Blender, a rig is known as an armature. So go over to ‘Add‘ and ‘Armature‘:

Position it in the center of the torso of our model.

To be able to see it, enable the X-ray mode:

Now that we have the first bone in place, we can connect it to other bones to create a tree hierarchy and thus move and rotate the arms and legs of our mesh.

Click on the top of the center bone and press E to create a new bone connected to the previous one, then bring it up to the neck:

Press E again and move it to the middle of the head.

From the bottom of the center bone, add one bone down to complete the spine region as follows:

We’re going to do the same thing for the arms, starting from the chest. Press E and add the needed bones for each part like so:

Next, select all 4 bones and press Shift + D. Then press S and X to scale on the x-axis, and enter -1 to flip it over to the other side.

Press G then X to move it along the x-axis aligned to the left arm.

Note that the chest bone that comes from the right arm is not connected to the center root, however. To correct that, select it and go to its Bone menu on the right-hand side of the screen. Enable ‘Connected‘ (under the ‘Relations’ drop-down menu):

For the legs, repeat the same process we’ve done for the arms:

After mirroring the left leg to make the right one and connecting the upper bone to the pelvis, we have our model all set as seen below:

Rigging – Part 2

In this lesson, we’re going to combine the armature with our mesh.

Note that the armature we’ve created is still a separate object from our model and won’t move our mesh around.

To join them, go into the object mode view and select the Armature and then the HumanoidModel, in this order:

Press Control + P so we can parent our selected elements, then choose ‘Armature Deform‘ ->  ‘With Automatic Weights‘.

Click on the resulting combined object and change to the pose mode. Now, if you click on a bone then press R you’re able to rotate it around like so:

Naming the Bones

The next thing we’re going to do is name the bones so we can keep track of all of them in our collection:

We can see the bone hierarchy under our Armature object:

Transcript – Preparing the Model

Welcome back everyone. In this lesson, we are going to be preparing our model ready to be rigged. Now what I mean by preparing our model is setting it up so that once we start rigging it, we’re not gonna run into any problems that we might bump into later on. So let’s get started.

First of all, what we’re going to do is make sure that our model’s normal directions are all facing the correct direction. Now, what is a model’s normal directions? Well, you see on our models, we have faces. On our torso for example, we have a face at the front, one on the side, one on the back.

On our head, we have a bunch of faces going around, one on the top, one on the bottom. And with these faces, they each have a direction that they are facing. Or more so, the vertices right here have a direction that they are pointing.

Now it’s important when 3D modeling that you don’t really have inside out 3D models. Now that might sound obvious, but when we were actually creating this model right here, we do in fact have inside out models.

And that occurs when we are flipping them over. When we were setting up the left arm here and the leg over here, we flipped them over by inversing the X scale, okay? And what that caused is not only to create a mirror copy of it, but in fact, invert it as well.

So these normal directions or these models faces are actually pointing to the inside of the model compared to this one on the right, which is pointing outwards. So how can we see that, first of all? Because right now they look exactly the same.

Well, what we’re gonna do is we’re first of all, going to select our model over here, okay? I’m selecting the arm that we started with, press tab to go into edit mode, and if we go at the top right corner here and click on this arrow, go down and select this face icon underneath normals, okay?

And what this is going to do is basically show the normal direction for each face. And you can of course change the size as well here, okay? And as you can see, we have lines pointing outwards on all of these faces right here. Even on the inside, we can see there is a little blue line pointing outwards from this side face here.

So that means the normals are pointing in the direction of these blue lines. Now let’s press tab, select the other arm and press tab. And you’ll see, we don’t really see any of those normal arrows. But if we go into the dropdown here and increase the size, you’ll see they start to poke out.

And what this is, is in fact, the faces from the other side of the model pointing through, okay? So that means that this model here is inside out. So what we need to do is we need to press F3 and we want to type recalculate, and you’ll see we have a recalculate outside right here, hit enter.

And as you can see, our normals have now been recalculated and they are now pointing in the correct direction. We can press tab again and to make this process faster we’re gonna, first of all, go ahead and combine all of our models into a single mesh, okay?

Because we don’t want to have separate models here that we can accidentally move around. So, I’m gonna press A, to select everything and then go control J to join them all. And as you can see here under cylinder, we now have a single mesh that we can select.

Now, if I press tab to go to edit mode, you’ll see that we have the normals here, okay? On the left-hand side here, they’re all correct. But as you can see on the right hand side, these arrows are a lot shorter because they’re poking through the entire model. So I want to go A to select everything. F3, recalculate outside, and there we go.

All the normal directions have now been fixed. We can bring this down a tiny bit here, like so, and as you can see, all of the model’s faces are now pointing in the same direction. Now, if we were to leave it, how it was, throughout blender, it generally would look the same.

But once you import it then into a game engine or into some other software, you’ll notice that these faces are going to be very, very dark and it’ll look quite trippy because you’re looking at the backside of the inside of the model, which yeah, is something that is good to fix early on before you notice it.

After you texture it. After you do everything and then import it into your game engine. So, we’ve got our model here. We’ve got everything set up correctly. We’ve even got it setup as a single mesh so we can move it around like that.

What we’re gonna do now is just orientate it in our scene where we want. So, I’m gonna get into a side view here. I’m gonna press G. I’m gonna hold shift so it snaps. And I’m just gonna have the feet sitting down, like so, okay? So we’re just gonna make it so that the feet are basically sitting on the ground like so, just on the red line.

And what we then want to do is go over to the left-hand side and click on this little icon right here, which is going to bring up the move gizmo. And this basically shows us where the model’s pivot point is. So if we rotate from here, as you can see, we’re rotating based on the arm, but we want to set the pivot point down to the center here, okay?

It’s just general good practice to have the center of the model defined at the base of its feet. When working with game engines and other software, it goes a long way and you don’t have to then find some work around to set it up properly, okay? So what we’re gonna do is we are gonna press F3 and we are going to go set origin, okay?

And we’re gonna go down to where it says origin to 3D cursor, which is this little circle right here, hit enter. As you can see the move gizmo has now been set down at the base of our model’s feet, okay? So if we want to rotate it or modify it, it’s gonna rotate and modify based off this pivot point.

So there we go. Okay, everything there is set up. And now what we can do is begin the process of actually creating our rig, okay? One final thing. Let’s rename this one to our, let’s go humanoid model. And now we’re ready to begin. So in the next lesson, we’re gonna go ahead and begin setting up our armature, okay?

We’re gonna set up our bones for all of our joints. And then from there, we’re gonna go into weight painting. We’re gonna make sure that all of the bones are behaving correctly. So thanks for watching and I’ll see you all in the next lesson.

Transcript – Rigging Part 1

Hey everyone and welcome back. In this lesson, we are gonna begin rigging our 3D character. So, first of all, what do I mean by rigging? Well, in blender and many of the 3D software, rigging is basically like creating a skeleton for a 3D mesh. And the skeleton allows us to rotate and modify the bones in order to rotate the rest of the mesh, okay?

So, the way it normally works is that you’ll have a root here in the center, which basically acts as the center position or the main bone of the structure. This will then branch off to the shoulders, to the elbows, to the wrists, et cetera.

We then have the neck for the head, we then have the other arms, so we have the other shoulder, the other elbow, the other wrist. This also then goes down to the legs, the knees and the ankles, okay? And these are basically the connections. So, you can of course make this as complex or as simple as you wish.

Some 3D models will earn the handful of bones while others may have quite a few, as you might want to rig each individual finger joint, each individual toe joint, really it’s entirely up to you, but for us, we’re gonna keep it nice and simple, okay? We’re just gonna have one joint for our hands and feet.

So, let’s get started with creating our rig. So, inside of blender, a rig is known as an armature, okay? So, we can go over to add and down to where it says armature right here. And this is gonna create our armature along with our first bone.

Now, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna bring this up and position it right about here, okay. And press tab to go into edit mode. Now, the first problem is that now armature is inside of our character model, so we can actually see it. So, a way we can bypass this is by enabling x-ray mode.

I’m gonna go to the top right corner here, click on this little down arrow and select x-ray. So, now we can see through our model and we can select and modify our armature. So, this here is a bone, okay? Now, a bone on itself doesn’t really do anything.

Instead, what we need to do is connect other bones to it, to create a sort of bone tree hierarchy, in order to then be able to move our arms, have our body rotate, which rotates the arms along with it, we’ll get into that. So, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna select the top bone right here and we are going to press E to extrude.

And what this would do is create ourselves a new bone connected to the previous and we’re gonna bring this up to the neck like so, okay? And then from here we can press E again and move this into the head. So, what we have done here is pretty much this bone right here is gonna be our chest.

This bone is gonna be sort of our stomach or a center region and this here is going to be our head. So, now what we can do is from this center one right here, or our roots actually, we’re gonna press E and bring this down and this is gonna act as our pelvis, okay? So, that is the main center spine set up right here.

Now, we can move on to the arms. So, for the arms I’m gonna select the upper body chest bone right here, press E extrude that over to the left arm like so, press E again to bring that over to the elbow and E again for the hand. And finally for our arm, we need to add one more bone, which is gonna go into the hand like so.

Okay, so now here we have our shoulder bone, our elbow bone and our hand bone right here. So, let’s go ahead and now duplicate these in order to flip them over to the other side. So, I’m gonna select all four of our bones here shift + D, I’m then gonna go scale X -1, and we can then move it over like so, okay?

So, by pressing G then X to move it along, the X axis, just like that. And what we need to do is actually connect this bone up ’cause as you can see right now it’s disconnected.

So, what we need to do, is we need to select it, go over to the bone icon down here in the properties window and under the relations tab here, we just want to enable connected. And as you can see, it is now connected to this center bone right here, so everything should move like so.

Okay, so we’ve got our arms, we’ve got our head, we’ve got our spine here. Now, we need our legs. And as a bit of a challenge, I want you to go ahead and try setting up the legs, okay? It’s done in pretty much the exact same way as with our arms.

Okay, so we’re gonna select this bone, extrude it, create our legs and then create our other legs. So, have a go at that and I’ll be right back to see how you done. Okay, so if you had to go with that, pretty much we just gonna press E, this and then gonna extrude out like so.

We can then press E again to create one for our knee and then another one for our ankle. And from my ankle, we then want to extrude this out into our foot, okay? So, here we have our foot joint, here we have our knee joint and here we have our main upper leg joints, okay?

And this is the connection to our leg. And then to create our other leg, which is gonna select all of these like so, control + D, scale while pressing S, on the x-axis -1. Okay, and moving that over like so. Selecting this bone and enabling connected, okay?

So, make sure then that this is all connected up like so, okay. So, when we moved the center bone here, it moves the roots and the legs, okay. So, they’re all connected. All right, and that is our rig set up and ready to go.

In the next lesson we are going to be looking at actually, then I’m combining this and merging it into our mesh so we can then stop posing it. We’re gonna give names to each of our bones and then going on into weight painting. So, thanks for watching and I’ll see you all then in the next lesson.

Transcript – Rigging Part 2

Welcome back everyone. In this lesson, we are going to be looking at how we can actually combine this armature to our mesh right here, okay? Because right now this armature is a separate object from our mesh and modifying it isn’t going to move our mesh around.

So what we need to do is let’s hop over into object mode by pressing tab. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna select our armature, hold shift and select our model. Okay, make sure it is in this order, okay? Select the armature first, then select the model.

And from here we can press control P and this is gonna open up the parent window, okay? And basically we can choose to parent this in different ways. What we’re gonna do is go over to armature deform and select with automatic weights, okay? So this is gonna generate automatic weights, which is something we’ll look at in a future lesson.

Okay, but for now you can see over here, the armature has combined into a single object, and now we are pretty much ready to pose it and see how it works.

So what we can do is we can go over to object mode. Oh, we need to select the armature, go over to pose mode right here, and we can then select a bone, press auto rotate, and as you can see, we can now rotate the arm, like so. We can rotate an elbow and we can rotate the hand.

We can then rotate this sort of upper body, like so. We can rotate our legs, our knees and our feet like so, okay? So just make sure everything has the ability to rotate the way that you want it to do. But you may notice that with the arms, when we rotate it, it rotates the body along with it.

So if we worked at the arms like this, it kind of looks a bit weird. That is something we will be fixing with weight painting. Same thing for the leg right here. It sort of morphs the body a bit, which is not exactly what we want. So yeah, there we go. We’ve got our armature now combined to our mesh.

One more thing we are gonna do is name our bones, because right now, if we open up our armature, open up pose, and look into our bones here, you’ll see that they are all named very different things, okay? And what we need to do is fix this by giving them names.

And this is gonna help us out when doing weight painting or just in general, some programs may be reading the bones for a specific direction or name. So it’s good to give them a name, okay? So first of all, we have this bone right here, which we can call the pelvis.

This one right here, which we can call our spine. This one right here, which we can call our chest. We then have our neck, okay? Over here, we can have our actually, no, we’ll do this one first. This one is gonna be our right-hand side because this is the direction that our model is looking.

So this is gonna be it’s right arm. And for that, what we’re gonna do is call this shoulder, underscore R, okay? For shoulder, underscore right. We then have elbow, underscore R. And we then have wrist, underscore R. Same thing for the left hand side.

Here we have shoulder, underscore L. We have elbow, underscore L and wrist underscore L, okay? For these parts here we are just gonna rename this one to be upper arm, underscore L, and this one is gonna be upper arm, underscore R.

Now down here for our legs, this one here is gonna be upper leg, underscore R. We then have our leg, underscore R. We then have our knee, underscore R and our ankle underscore R. Same thing for the left-hand side here. And there we go.

So now over here, inside of the hierarchy, we can see, we have our spine, upper arm, L. Inside of that, shoulder L, elbow L, and wrist L, okay? Same for everything else. Make sure that they all got the correct naming. Okay, there we go. And from here, what we can do is a number of things, okay?

If you’re happy with your model, you can go ahead export it, add it to whatever software you’re using. But as you can see here, like I said, with the rotations on the arms, it is a bit weird on the upper body.

So what we’re gonna do is modify the weight painting. So that is something we’re gonna be looking at in the next lesson. So I’ll see you all then.

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Player Sprite

In this lesson, we’re going to create our player character.

As the character is the one thing that should stand out the most in the game, we should prefer to use bright colors instead of dark ones.

For that, create a new layer (Control + Shift + N or Command + Shift + N if you’re on a Mac) and name it ‘Player‘.

Let’s make our player a knight. We can begin with its silhouette which is basically the outline that we’re going to fill in with detail as we go.

Note that each person has their own style and may choose to draw their characters with different proportions than what’s seen in the course, so feel free to adapt it as you see fit.

We’re going to start with a 5 pixels square head for our player, plus a little feather poking out the helmet on top of his head, in white like so:

Add the torso a little bit behind his head, and then draw the legs:

The front arm will be 3 pixels in front of the torso as his rear arm is overlapping with his body. We can have 2 pixels for the shoulder and the cape that runs along his neck as shown below:

Coloring the Character

Let’s begin by coloring the helmet a light gray and then picking up a slightly darker gray for the rest of the body so that the head stands out more in contrast. You can use the same color as the helmet to paint the arms or you can choose a darker color for the arms if you want an even clear separation of the different parts that form our character:

If we zoom out, we see that our character is already starting to get shape:

Now, let’s color both the cape and feather with red to make our player pop up from the background:

Adding Details to the Helmet

Here is where we can add more traits to our character. For instance, to make him look more serious we can use a very dark gray for the visor:

As a finer detail, add a 2 pixels white reflection at the top of the helmet to indicate that it is metallic:

Building up the Character’s Look

Although our character is looking good, it’s still a bit simple as his torso is just of a plain color right now.

Let’s increase the character’s height by 1 pixel (just pull the legs down one ‘line’) and add a brown belt over his armor:

Having a belt like that, his right hand in the foreground and his left hand in the background pass the impression that the character is facing our right-hand side as well as his head. Note that it is important to create your character facing a specific direction from the beginning, especially if it’s a platformer.

Finally, let’s add a little gold belt buckle:

And this is our character ready to go! Note that it is identifiable from a distance and the cape and feather are pretty visible as wanted.

In the next lesson, we’ll create a walk animation for our player character.

Transcript

Hey everyone and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to be looking at creating ourselves a player character. Now when creating ourselves a player character, it’s very important to know that this is the one thing that should most likely stand out the most, okay?

So when creating a player, you don’t want to be using dark colors, such as a dark green or a dark red, okay, or a dark blue, you wanna be using nice and bright colors, such as a light blue or yellow or a white, okay?

So something that is nice and bright that the player can identify along a dark surface, okay. It’s gotta contrast the background.

So I’m gonna create a new layer with Control Shift N. I’m gonna call this one our player right here. And for our player, I’m gonna make this a knight, okay, so it’s just gonna be a knight, he’ll be able to hold a sword, maybe a bow. Gonna be quite a versatile character.

So, to begin, what we’re gonna do is create the silhouette for our character, okay, and this is basically going to be the outline that we’re then gonna fill in with detail. So I’m just gonna use this white color right here for the silhouette and I’m gonna go ahead and just outline our character.

Now, in Pixel Art, there are many, many different styles of creating characters and different people have different ways of doing it. You might wanna create stuff with more realistic proportions or you might want to have more abstract proportions. That’s entirely up to you.

I have my own style I do, you might have your own style, so I’m just gonna go ahead and give you the process as I go along. So, starting with the head, what we’re gonna do is I’m just gonna give it a nice square head of five pixels, okay, just something like that, there we go.

Since it’s a knight, we’ll also probably put a little feather up on top of his head here, so poking out the helmet. From here, we can then create the torso and the torso is going to go a bit behind his head so his head’s poking a bit forward.

That can also give the illusion that he’s actually facing in forward direction rather than just standing up straight looking at you. So we’re gonna create it like so.

Okay, bring this torso down a bit here, okay, and then we can do the legs. Now for the legs, I like just doing simple little legs like this so that the legs are right there. We can give him his front arm which is just going to be three pixels in front of him like so.

His rear arm is gonna be overlapping his body right here so we can just give him two little pixels here for the shoulder, and then there’s also gonna be a cape and this cape is just gonna run along his back like so. Okay, and there we go.

That is the silhouette of our character. So from a distance, we’re gonna make it so that this, nothing else really has this design. We got the cape in the back and I think the most noticeable feature is going to be this feather here, okay, which is going to be the identifier than this is our player character.

So, we’ve got our player sprite outlined right here, now we need to fill in the details. So, let’s start with the base colors of his armor, and for that, we’re just going to select a color right here and start by coloring in the helmet. So that is gonna be the helmet color like so.

Now for the body, I am gonna make the body a bit darker, just so that the head stands out and that there’s more of a contrast between where the head starts and the body ends.

For example, if I just color the rest of him right here in this gray color, whoops, oh yeah, just like this, okay, you’ll notice that it all blends in a bit too much and we don’t really have that much definition of where the head is, where the arms are, where the legs are, it all just looks like he’s wearing one big suit.

So, what we need to do is divide these colors up but still make them appear as if they are part of the same color set.

And for that, we can just use a darker color for the body, so I’m just gonna select this other dark color that comes with our color palette right here and I’m just going to color in the body, like so. And there we go. And from here then we can fill in the arms.

Now, this is entirely up to you. You can choose to go ahead and use this same color that we used for the head for the arms like that, or you can choose to use an even darker color for the arms, okay. You can choose to use maybe something like this for the arms, okay?

I’m probably gonna go for this, since it adds another layer of contrast to show where the arms are, where the torso is and where the head is. Now we need to add in the details because we got our character here, but it doesn’t really stand out that much.

So first of all, let’s color in the cape and the feather. I’m gonna use this nice red color. We can fill those in just like so. As you can see, there we go, we’ve got some contrast added with the red, easily able to identify where our player is now.

Let’s work on the helmet now, okay, and the helmet is where you can add more to your character. Okay, what sort of character are they? Are they a stone character, a funny character.

We’re gonna make our character looks pretty serious, so he’s gonna have a dark-colored opening on his visor here, so we’re just gonna have a couple of pixels just like so.

We might even want to add a bit of a reflection at the top here, so we can get white and just add two pixels here to make it look like it is a metallic helmet. And we’ll go over looking at reflections, shine and all that later on once we get into making coins and stuff.

But yeah, adding in white specs can give it the illusion that this is some shiny armor, okay? We’ll just do on the helmet for to keep it nice and simple. So now we’ve got everything, but it still looks quite simple, okay. And the torso, this is where it’s happening.

So you might go, okay, we might wanna put some more color contrast over in the legs like so, but even that doesn’t really do much. So what I normally like to do is when I have these medieval-themed characters, I like to add in some basic, just straps, okay, because a knight, he would have straps all over his armor, he’ll have a belt and stuff.

So we can add those in too. And also, what I’m gonna do is go ahead and maybe just increase the height of our character here a bit. So I’m just gonna make the legs go down a bit more, like so. Okay, and also gonna make the cape go down a bit more as well, just like that.

And now let’s add in our belts. So for this, I’m just gonna select a brown color right here and I’m just gonna create a little belt outline like so, make it look like he also has a bit of a suspender and this also gives the player the illusion that this character is facing in the right-hand direction, okay, because they have their right arm in the foreground, their left arm in the background.

They have their face facing in a certain direction as well, so it’s important that you create your character with facing a specific direction in mind, especially if it’s a platformer.

Even if it’s just a normal 2D game, unless your character is facing directly at the camera for when they’re moving down or moving up, you should really design your character in a way so that they are facing a certain direction.

We can then also maybe add a bit of detail to the belt by adding a little gold belt buckle, okay? And there we go. You can, of course, add much more detail to this character if you wish, but I think for now, we’re gonna keep it like this.

If you zoom out, you can still see that from the distance at which the player would be from the camera when playing the game, it does look pretty good and it does stand out with the cape and with the feather, so definitely adding in these identifiable features to both your player and your enemies are going to be good, okay?

So, we’ve got our player here. Now in the next lesson, we are gonna be going over setting up a player walk cycle, okay? Because right now we have our player for when they’re just standing still, but what happens if we want our player to start walking, okay?

How are we gonna animate this player so that we have their legs lift up and what things are going to react based on that? Okay, so thanks for watching and I’ll see you all then in the next lesson.

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Metal Objects

In this lesson, we’re going to see how to create metallic objects.

We’re going to create a gold coin that our player can collect in our game.

Select a yellow color as the base color and make a ‘circle‘ shape:

Let’s add the shading to it in orange and a white specular pixel like so:

Coin Sparkle Animation

To create an animation of the coin twinkling in the light, duplicate the coin sprite three times:

Merge them together by selecting the three layers, right-clicking on them, and selecting ‘Merge Layers‘. Name the result layer ‘Coin‘.

We want the light to catch the edge of the coin, as it’s a cylindrical object, and so we follow the external shape of it instead of moving the reflective part to the middle of the coin:

Creating a Goblet

First, we create the outline of the goblet:

Following the same process we’ve done for the coin, we have to add the shading and the reflective specks of light to it:

We have 2 points of reflection here to give off the impression that it is a 3D object.

With pixel art, it really comes down to experimentation. You can even take a look at real-life references to better translate any object into pixel art.

Animating the Goblet Sprite

Duplicate the goblet three times to create the animation and merge the layers:

Rename the merged layer to ‘Goblet‘.

In this case, we’re going to keep the sparkly pixel on the middle of the goblet still as the light doesn’t get to hit it as much and we’re going to bring down the one on the edge like so:

Making the Sword Shiny

As our sword is already white, we can add the specular light on a blue color instead:

And the animation could be something like this:

Transcript

Welcome back everyone. In this lesson, we are going to be looking at creating metallic objects.

Objects that are metal, such as coins, such as platery, such as a bunch of other things that you might want to shine or have reflective surfaces, not necessarily reflective surfaces, but give off the illusion that these are nice, shiny pieces of gold, jewelry, et cetera.

So what we’re gonna do is, we are gonna create a gold coin that our player can collect in this game that we’re creating, Spritesville. Let’s just move the trees and the rocks up here for now.

I’m gonna create a brand new layer. I’m gonna call this one coin and let’s start of course, with the silhouette. So I’m just gonna select this yellow color right here, which is gonna be the base color and I’m just gonna make this a simple little circle here. A nice four-by-four circle, like so.

Now, we’ve got this coin here. It doesn’t necessarily look shiny just yet, so we need to start by adding in some definition. I’m gonna start off by adding in the shading. I’m just gonna add that orange in like here, okay? As you can see, it sort of gives off a bit of shading.

So got the shiny side or the side that the sun is hitting on the right here. We can select the white and add in a bit of a specular, just like that. And there is our gold coin, which has a specular right here.

And the specular is basically the angle where the reflectiveness of a surface is in line with the source of that light, so it’s the brightest part and it is what’s reflecting back in your eye. So if we look from a distance, it does look pretty shiny.

And we can also go ahead and create a basic little sprite animation for this of this specular, sort of going along with the coin’s surface. So later on, once import this into a game engine, you can actually have a reflective surface animating, so it looks like the coin is, you know, maybe sort of twinkling in the light.

So for this, I’m gonna get our coin and I’m gonna duplicate it three times, like so. Let’s get all these layers and combine them into one right here, okay? Call this one coin and I’m gonna remove the specular on the last two here.

So how would this look like if we want to animate this white dot sort of moving along the surface, okay? Well, you sort of wanna go with the form that you have.

This is basically a flat cylindrical coin and if we have this running along the surface, the light is gonna be catching the edge. So we don’t want this light to go from here, then like here, then here.

Instead, what we want to do is sort of have it match the surface of where the light would be hitting, because what we’re catching here is just the edge of the coin as the light sort of flickers with whatever light source is hitting it.

So on our second coin here, what we could do, is maybe have the light over here and then on our final one, we might want to have it down here. So it has this nice little animation of the specular moving along the edge of the coin. Not the center of the coin.

Having it moving along the edge of the coin, it sort of gives off the illusion that this is a cylindrical object with a light sort of hitting the edge.

All right, just like that. So now as a bit of a challenge, I want you to go ahead and I want you to create the shading and create the specular reflections of a goblet, of like a golden cup that you may have, you know, as a piece of treasure, for example. I’m gonna go ahead here and create the silhouette.

So here, I’m just gonna call this one goblet. I’m gonna create the silhouette right here. This is just going to be a little cup, like so. Okay, something like that. Now I want you to go ahead as a bit of a challenge and create the specular for this and maybe even go ahead and create an animation as well.

So, I’ll be right back to see how you done. Okay, so I hope you had a go at that challenge. Here is what mine looks like. We’ve got this orange darker shading, where it’s sort of not in the way of the light.

So we’re not really getting the brightest part of the goblet in these areas, at the base, which would then be covered by the top and also on the left-hand side here.

Now, as you can see, I’ve got two speculars and the reason why, is because unlike the coin, which is a flat object, a goblet, you know, that would be a cylindrical object. It will be round, okay? If you think of this from a top-down perspective, it would look something like this, okay.

You have your sort of circular object, like that. Compared to a coin, which from above, would probably just look like this, all right? So with this goblet, you can add a bit more definition with the lighting to play around with it, to give off the illusion that it is a 3D object, sort of compressed down into pixel art.

And I mean, this is entirely up to you in how you do it. Experimenting with placing the light in different areas, zooming out, seeing what looks best.

You know, it really comes down to experimentation, maybe even looking at references of real life objects if you want to sort of translate a sphere into pixel art and get all the lighting correctly, I’d recommend just looking up images of spheres or you know, even a real life example would be good as well, as at the end of the day, the pixel art with the lighting, we sort of want it to simulate reality as we are trying to trick people into looking at these group of pixels and having them arranged into an object that we want them to understand.

So here we have our goblet. We can also then go ahead and duplicate it three times to create the animation, just like so. We can combine all three by selecting all the layers, right clicking them and going, merge layers, rename this to goblet.

I’m gonna remove the specular on each of these other ones. Now, the way we want the light to go on this is, we sort of want light, the first specular, which is this one right here, we want this one to actually move, just like it does with coin.

But the center one, since this is sort of at the middle where the light is, it’s hard to really explain, but we’re sort of just gonna keep this one still. So what we’re gonna do, is we’re gonna have this moving down here. It’s gonna sort of have this light still here and then have something like that, okay.

So this is gonna give off a bit of an animation with the specular moving along, just like you’ve done with the coin, but the middle one here is gonna stay put, because this is where the light is sort of not going to really be moving, ’cause if you think about it, this is if we think of this as a sphere, for example, and we have a light moving around a sphere, the edge of the sphere, the light is going to be moving quite a bit, but the center of the sphere, it doesn’t really have anywhere way to move since that is the reflection point that is hitting in your eyes.

Okay, it’s kind of hard to understand, but if you have real life objects and you look at them and you sort of rotate them around the light, you can see how these sort of behaviors can be seen. Yeah, overall, just like I said, experimentation.

We’re not really gonna know what the final animation looks like or if it’s good until we actually put it into a piece of software that we can actually preview it in.

But for now, that is just to look at how we can have metallic objects in pixel art and how we can get the specular light moving along the surface based on, you know, what sort of object it is.

If we go over to our sword here, for example, our sword’s already white and we can’t really get a whiter color, so I’m just gonna make the specular be a blue, okay? For example, on our sword, we might have the specular up here to begin with or we might have two pixels here since this is quite a long sword.

So the light might be, the specular might be a bit larger and then we can have it there. We can then have it animating down here and then we can have it here. So it’s sort of moving along the surface of whatever object you have. So, there we go. That is looking at metallic objects for pixel art. Thank you for watching.

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You can access the full course here: Intro to Pixel Art with Photoshop

Pixel Art Background

In this lesson, we will be looking at setting up a background for a game in a pixel-art style.

Background Setup

Let’s start by setting up the background sky by filling the default layer with blue color and renaming the layer to “Sky.”

Now what we want to do is set up our maintains. Let’s create a new layer by pressing Ctrl + Shift + N (or Cmd + Shift + N) and name it “Mountains”.

We will first draw mountains with the Pencil tool on the Mountains layer and fill it with the Paint Bucket tool.

Adding Details

Next, we’re going to add highlights and shadows to the mountains. But, first, let’s select the mountains with the Magic Wand tool to draw inside the mountain.

Make sure to always keep in mind the direction of the sunlight. The shadows should consistently appear on the opposite side of the highlights.

Once you have added the highlights and shadows to the mountains, deselect the mountains by pressing Ctrl + D (or Cmd + D) to no longer be bound to the selected area.

Adding A Gradient Color

The sky looks a bit too bland now, so we want to add some gradient to the sky. A gradient is a gradual change in color, shade, or level of brightness.

To do this, we’re going to create a new layer called “Sky Haze” and put it between the Mountains layer and the Sky layer.

To add a gradient to the layer, hold down the left mouse button on the Paint Bucket tool and select the Gradient Tool option.

You can change the gradient’s color by clicking on the Gradient Setting at the top corner of the screen.

This will open up the Gradient Editor window, where you can modify the gradient by double-click on one of the color stops.

You can also set the opacity of the color stops so that it fades out to a transparent color. For example, we’ll set both colors to white, the start opacity to 100%, and the final opacity to 0%.

Next to the gradient color button is where we can set the gradient shape. Let’s change this to linear.

We can now click on the bottom of the screen and drag it upwards to add a gradient to the sky.

To make the gradient look more pixellated, we can apply a Mosaic filter by going to Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic.

Finally, we want to make the sky look more wavy and natural by warping the layer. Press Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T), right-click > select Warp.

We can now modify the shape by dragging the control points.

Note that clicking on an anchor point lets you edit the control points surrounding that anchor. This is similar to modifying a curved segment of a vector graphic.

Transcript

Welcome back everyone. In this lesson, we are going to be looking at setting up a background for a game that we might wanna create. Okay, it’s gonna have some mountains at the bottom and a nice sky up in the air.

So, let’s go file, new, it’s gonna have a width of 300 pixels and a height of 168, okay? We’re gonna click on create and here we are in our new document. Now to begin, let’s start by setting up the background sky, okay, so I’m gonna rename this layer here to be sky and I’m gonna select a bluish color here that we’re gonna be using. We’ll select the paint bucket tool and just click to color in everything.

Now what we want to do is set up our mountains. So I’m gonna go control, shift, N, call this one mountains and we are now on a new layer. Now for our mountains, we wanna select a greenish color, something like this and inside of here, we can then start by drawing in our mountains and how we might want them to look. Okay, so for this I’m just simply going to begin drawing them in like so. Okay, something like that.

Next what we want to do is fill it in so that we don’t see any of the blue down here. So we’ll go to the paint bucket tool, color these in like so. But the problem here is that the mountains look kinda bland, okay, they don’t really look that good at all. So how do we fix this? Well, what we want to do is add highlights and shadows to these mountains.

Now to do that, we need to figure out, okay, what sort of direction is the sun going to be facing? So let’s say the sun is facing the top right corner of the screen here, down. So that means these sides of the mountains are going to be brighter than the other side of the mountains, which are gonna have shadows.

So, what I’m gonna do is make it so that we can only draw on this mountain because right now, if I select the brush tool and I go to draw highlights with a lighter green, you’ll notice that I can go off the edge here, which is something we don’t want, okay? We want to only be able to draw inside of this mountain range. So to do that, I’m gonna select the wand tool and I’m going to click on our mountains.

So now we have the mountains selected, if I go to my brush tool and begin drawing, you’ll notice that I can only draw on the highlighted pixels, which is great. So let’s go through each of our mountains here and just start drawing in the highlights. And there we go. Now next up, what we need to do is draw in the shadows. So for the shadows I’m gonna select a darker green here and I’m gonna go in and just start laying those out as well.

Now, I’m gonna follow the mountains topography here so I’m gonna select this and just go down like that, okay? And as you can see, if I go control H to get rid of the grid and the outline, that’s what it looks like. So, I can then maybe add a shadow here. And there we go. Something like this where we have the highlights and the shadows of the mountain. You can, of course, make it a lot better, but this is just a rough, quick done version of this, okay?

So, we’ve got our sky, but the sky doesn’t look realistic, okay, so how do we make our sky look realistic? Well, if you look out in the real world, you’ll notice that, at the horizon, it is much brighter than it is the higher up you go, okay? As you look down the horizon, you’re seeing more of the atmosphere, whereas if you look up, you’re seeing basically less of the atmosphere, okay, and you’re seeing more into space.

So, what we need to do is I’m gonna create a new layer here and I’m gonna call this one our sky haze. I’m gonna put this below the mountains, but above the sky, and to do this, we are gonna be using a gradient. Now a gradient is basically a thing we can draw out which basically transitions from one color to another.

So if we go over here to our paint bucket tool and hold down left mouse, you’ll see that we can select the gradient tool and before we do that, we actually need to go to our move tool, right click on the mountains, deselect those so we’re no longer drawing inside the mountains, go back to our gradient tool, click and drag and as you can see, a gradient has now been formed, okay?

So, at the top corner of the screen here we have all the gradient settings, we can choose basically the color of the gradient here by double clicking on it to open up the gradient editor.

Now for us, we’re gonna have a go from white to transparent, so I’m gonna double click on this icon down here to change the first color to white, click on the end node here to change that color to white as well, and I’m gonna click on these black boxes which allow us to change the opacity. It’s gonna go from 100% down to 0%, okay? And as you can see, it fades out as it goes along. Hit okay, and now if I click and drag, you’ll see that it’s this white fade, like so.

We’re gonna change it from radial to a linear gradient so it is much more straight, like so, and at the bottom of the screen, I’m going to click and drag upwards, like that, and there we go, that is our gradient pretty much done, but one thing you may notice is that it’s not pixelar, okay? This is a smooth color transition from one to another, whereas down here, we have rigid colors.

So how do we convert this gradient to a more pixely looking image? Well, the way we can do that is by going up to filter, then we want to go to pixelate and then we want to click on mosaic.

And what mosaic does is it basically pixelizes an image. Okay, it gets your image and it basically splits it up into cells and each cell can only have one single color and right now each cell is five pixels big and if we increase this number, you’ll see the cells are getting bigger and bigger and if we bring it down, it gets smaller and smaller.

So, let’s set our cells down to five, click okay and you’ll notice that it now looks a lot more pixely. But it looks too uniform and that’s a bit of a problem. So the way we can make it look a bit more wavy and natural is by going control T, right clicking and clicking on warp and what warp allows us to do is click and drag to move this image around in various different ways, okay?

So, we can just warp this image around so it looks a bit different, like so, all right? We can then hit enter and there we go, that is our atmosphere done, and in fact, we might want to make this warp actually curve down a bit at the edges here. Hit okay and there we go.

So that is our pixely horizon right here looking nice. You can, of course, go ahead, you can change the sky color, you can change the haze color. That is entirely up to you, but this is just our mountain range right here, set up and ready to be added to a game.

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