Kitchen Background

Hi All,

I'm back again with another post at last. I'm putting more effort into trying to secure funding these days but I've not stopped working on the project.
In an earlier post you will have seen that I had created this Kitchen background before using Serif DrawPlus. After experimenting in Anime Studio and viewing Parker's excellent background painting tutorials on the Lost Marble Anime Studio Forum I decided to try my hand at painting more backgrounds in Anime Studio. It's probably because I'm so used to using the drawing tools in AS but it felt more natural to me to create the backrounds this way.


I started by loading in my layout sketch into Anime Studio and tracing the walls and floor.


I then added some kitchen cupboards and a fridge on separate layers.


Next was a table and chairs.


Additional details were added on the table.


Finally, the kitchen had to look a mess after the robot CHESTA had been 'baking' in there so all these details were added. I only created one 'dough splat' and copied and pasted it around and adjusted the points a little to make them look different.



Out of interest I rendered a short animation. In the final shot characters come through the door and I will also animate elements in the background such as the dripping dough.

Melodee Character

Hi Everyone,
This is a young girl called Melodee who, as the name would suggest, is very into music. She can play any instrument and has a music and MP3 type device attached to her wrist. Luckily I'd already created a version of her in Animation:Master a few years back. This came in very handy for, not only assisting in the creatiion of the character turnarounds but especially in seeing the wrist device in various poses.


This is the character as created in Animation:Master. I use Maya every day in my work but it's always a pleasure to come back to A:M. I had planned on creating this project in A:M originally but the rendering times of CG are so prohibitive without a decent render farm. Also, it's quite nice, after being involved in CG all day, to get back to drawing and creating in 2D even if it is still using computers.


I zoomed the camera in on the wrist device and while rotating the camera around the wrist rendered a series of images.












These images were loaded into Anime Studio Pro and traced. I could have worked the shapes out but this certainly saved some brain power.


The finished character looks much like that below. I've since made the arms slightly shorter and tweaked a little.



That's all for the moment. Thanks for looking.

(c) copyright 2011 Dale Hemenway