Planning Your Asset and Technical Constraints
This page will cover the technical side of drawing your character. For the most part your imaginations the limit, however due to the nature of 2D rig animation as well as cutting some corners for the sake of convinience, there are certain things you should keep in mind.
For normal character id recommend something roughly around 800x1000. The exact number doesnt really matter but id recommend leaving a little bit of padding around your character, mainly because it will suck if you decide you need to resize the canvas later.
Additionally id strongly recommend keeping the size reasonable, you dont need 2k textures for character that will take maybe 1/8th of your screen at most. As such id recommend keeping it under 1600x1600 as you really shouldnt need this much detail.
Ill be assuming you are using Krita but pretty much all respectable drawing software should have some equivalent of this and it should be mostly simmilar. If you decide to use something else Id recommend looking it up first to make sure you dont need to setup your layers differently. You can always export parts manually but it will be tedious and it will suck.
Each "part" should be in its own group. Both for the sake of organisation and because it will matter when exporting. Name them in a simple and descriptive way.
Simplified example:
- head
- torso
- hand_L
- arm_lower_L
- arm_upper_L
You can technically change it later but that will require you to mess with Blender materials. The order of the groups "doesnt matter" but you want to think about which parts should be infornt of what when animated. You will need to manually re-do this order in blender so it is useful to have it as a guide.
The main question is:
Does this part need to move on its own?
Pretty much all the body parts should get their own groups. Id recommend having a separate torso and waist, neck and head, and both arms and legs should have 3 groups each.
Most accessories should just be part of whatever they are attached to. But if the piece is "important enough" and would feel wrong to not animate, you can separate it out too.
Examples of what id separate:
- Weapons
- Backpacks
- Capes
- Pauldrons
Things i wouldnt
- Belts
- Rings
- Necklaces
- Armbands
While pretty much anything is possible, certain things are harder to animate than others. In particular, things that need to bend smoothly. And by that I dont meen arms or legs but anything thats inhernetly not very riggid. Thes would all need extra work. Mainly subdividing their plane and doing weight painting. And if you get really ambitious you might just need to give them a proper mesh instead of just a flat plane.
Alternatively you can partially cheat that by segmenting them in to a lot of groups and animating them that way. Its actually not that unreasonable to do, especially if you setup Inverse Kinematics, something which i strongly recommend doing anyways, but you cant ever quite get rid of the segmented look unles you use an ungodly amount of groups.
This include but arent limited to:
- Ribbons
- Chains
- Capes
- Tentacles
- Long Tails
- Flowing robes
You can still have those on your character and have them look good, Id just recommend keeping their movements simple.
Follow these steps:
- Tools
- Export Layers
- Select your project (you need to click it)
- Select your output folder
- Enable Export in batch mode
- Enable Groups as layers
- Enable Ignore invisible layers
- Change format to PNG
After it runs you should be left with bunch of separate images in your chosen folder.
For this workflow, I keep the exports as full-canvas images. This means every exported part keeps the same canvas size, even if most of the image is transparent.
The upside is that everything lines up much more easily once imported into Blender. The downside is that transparent space still takes texture memory, so try to keep your canvas size and part count reasonable, but so long as you stay under about 25 parts it really shouldnt be an issue for any hardware that can actually run the game.