EP. 15: GIMP – Accesorii / Accessories (RO/EN)

Just like we promised, today we will draw the faces for the characters we made in Blender. I am going to be using GIMP, a free drawing and photo editing program. You can use any program you want.

You can draw in Blender too, Grandpa, but it is a little harder than doing it in GIMP. On top of that, it's good to know how to use a drawing program like GIMP because when we'll get to a series dedicated to Blender alone we will need to create textures based on UV maps, which is much easier to work with in GIMP. The layout of the two programs is also somewhat similar. We have the menu at the top, tools on the left and a list like the one in the Outliner on the right.

To start, we first need to create a new file by going to the main menu at the top and clicking File - New... where we will set the size of the canvas to 1080x1080 for a square.

In the list I mentioned on the right we will find Layers, starting with the one with a white background. We do not need it, so we will left click on its name and click the X button in the bottom right to remove it. Instead, we can add a new layer from the button with a plus sign, which we will name "Eye".

Indeed we could've double clicked the layer to rename it, Grandpa, but it wasn't transparent, which is why we added a new one that we can tell is transparent by the tiled squares in the background.

To start drawing, we need to pick up the pencil from the tool menu on the left by right clicking on the paint brush and picking the Pencil out of the dropdown menu. We can change the pencil's Size from the slider, modifying it by hovering over the field and using the scroll wheel, clicking the up and down arrows next to it, double clicking the text value and typing on our keyboard or by dragging the handle of the slider.

It's actually quite simple when you try it out, Grandpa! It's just like in Blender, drag the slider left or right to decrease or increase the size of the pencil! To change its colour, we need to click on the left one of the two coloured squares in the tool menu, which will open up a window for us to choose the colours similarly to the circle in Blender. Once we've selected our colour, we can click OK to go back. The arrow next to the two squares can be used to switch the active colour we are working with and keep one in the back to quickly switch between them, as well as a button portraying them as black and white to revert them and clear our current colours.

Now that we've understood how the settings for the pencil work, let's draw with it! It's really easy, all you have to do is click and drag on the canvas area. If you make a mistake, you can undo it by pressing [CTRL] + [Z] on your keyboard, or use the eraser tool from the menu on the left, just as you use the pencil. You can set the eraser tool to Hard Edge, which will make it function more like the pencil, removing the fuzziness of the brush, instead erasing, as the setting implies, with a hard edge.

To draw the outline of our eye, you can do it freehanded, or you can get a more uniform shape by clicking with the pencil and making a dot, followed by another dot placed while holding down [SHIFT], making a straight line between the two points. If you also hold [CTRL] while holding down [SHIFT], the line will snap to one of the preset directions, aligning vertically, horizontally, or one of the diagonals. This feature is useful to make squares and rectangles more easily.

Grandpa, to see more of the canvas you can hold down the [CTRL] button and scroll up or down with the wheel on your mouse, zooming in or out towards the cursor. Now that we have a square for our eye, we can take the bucket fill tool from the left and use it to fill the square with a colour, in our case white.

For the coloured part of the eye, the iris and pupil, we should add another layer above the eye named "Pupil", allowing us to draw it without messing up what's underneath, for when we will need to change the direction of the eyes.

On this new layer, we can draw the iris with our preferred colour, just like we drew the outline of the eye, then draw an even smaller, black shape inside for the pupil. We can also add a white rectangle in the corner of the iris to add a bit of stylised sparkle, and there we have our first eye done!

Now, to make another one without having to draw it from scratch, we can add a Layer Group to sort the already existing layers, which we will rename to "Right Eye". Into the group we will bring the other two layers we've made by clicking and dragging their names and releasing when our mouse hovers over the group, highlighting it visually.

Once we've ordered them inside the group, we can right click it and select the Duplicate Layer option, which will create a copy of the group with everything inside, that we can rename to "Left Eye".

To position this new eye on the correct side of the face, we need to pick the Move tool from the left and make sure that the "Move the active layer" option is selected, allowing us to move the entire group as long as it is selected in the list on the right, which we can verify by clicking its name.

With the Move tool active we can click and drag anywhere on the canvas to move around the layer group, and if we hold down [CTRL] it will allign the movement to one of the directions, just like it did when we held down [CTRL] with the pencil tool, so we can make sure that the eyes will be at the same height. We also need to move the left eye's pupil layer with the Move tool so it looks like the character is facing us.

We also need to draw the mouth and the nose of the character, which we will do as we have been doing so far, making separate layers with simple names and ordering them properly in the list. You can also optionally draw eyebrows, or test out different accessories, like a pair of glasses. What do you say, Grandpa, do you like it?

But this is me, Grandpa. I don't have a moustache.

When I'll grow up and I won't feel like shaving I'll test out a moustache, but it would still take a while to get it to be white. Until then, we've got our finished face for the character which we need to save by going to the main menu at the top and clicking on File - Save As... to save the GIMP project as an .xcf which we can open at a later time to continue working with our layers. We also need to go to File - Export As... to turn all the layers we've drawn into a single .png which we will be able to open in Blender.

Once we have both of the files saved, we need to compress the image, a process we will have to repeat for all of the images we will use in the game in order to optimise performance and save space.

Don't worry, Grandpa. You won't even be able to tell which moustache is the original. It's time to open up Caesium, a free image compression program. We can drag our image into the big white space in the middle of its window from the folder on our computer, step that we can do with multiple images selected at the same time, for when we will be compressing our finished animations.

In the menu on the right we will pick the Mode: Quality and set it to 80 for PNGs, after which we can press the compression button. It will warn us that the process is irreversible, so it's best we make a copy of our original images. Even though compression is almost lossless, the image will not be able to be properly edited anymore; if we open the compressed image in GIMP the result will be unpredictable, the image being distorted upon saving it again or the colours being limited.

We can now go back into Blender and open the file we've been working on in the previous episodes, and we can go to the menu at the top of the 3D Editor to Add - Image - Mesh Plane, navigating to the folder where we saved the compressed png of the face.

We need to position it using the tools in the menu on the left, after which we need to use SHIFT to select both of them, making sure the last one selected was the body, which will preserve the position of its origin, and then we need to press [CTRL] + [J] on the keyboard to join the two objects together. We can now save our file, play the animation to make sure everything is as it should be, then render the animation, and we're done, Granpda! Once the images will finish rendering, we need to take them through Caesium and they'll be ready to use in our game!

That's excatly why the next two episodes will be about music and sounds, Grandpa, to use in animation as well as in games.

So, pratice your drawing skills and make as many accessories and character variants as you can! You will need them for the game. We wish you luck!