Create Animated Pixel Visualizers / Music Videos / Animations Pokemon Style | Adobe Ps / Ae Tutorial

[Music] what's going on guys welcome back to another video today we're talking all about pixel art visualizers i've been enjoying a lot of the visualizers that are being put out by trippy red he's really collaborating with a bunch of really cool artists whether you see this kind of pokemon style pixel which we're going to be focusing on today some of these different scenes or even some of these cool cartoony 3d things that i really want to get into so if you guys want to see a part two where we talk about creating these 3d pixelated characters i thought this one was really cool with the dragon and everything slap a like on the video let's try and get to 2 000 likes on this and we'll put out the 3d version today we're focusing all about using adobe photoshop adobe after effects to create these cool pixel animations now you may be thinking i don't have a lot of artistic ability i'm not good at drawing how will i be able to do this i promise you the method i'm going to show you is very beginner friendly i'm going to show you some different templates we can use to get you used to drawing the animations so i hope you have fun with this whether you're making a music video visualizer animation for fun whatever let's hop in and get started so the majority of this tutorial is going to be in photoshop that's where we'll create our assets here and then we'll bring them into after effects to composite so let's click create new whenever you're creating pixel art you want to have a small file size we're going to scale it up later so that we can have it in hd 1080p whatever so for me my project size was 47 by 64 pixels you could also go 24 24 so i'm going to click create and i'm going to start off here by showing you some essential things you need to know so that you don't run into any problems with this workflow so ctrl alt mouse wheel here to zoom into our canvas if you guys want to have these grid lines like mine you want to go up to view go down to show and just turn on grid also make sure extras is checked on now you'll be able to see all of these individual squares so to actually paint the artwork here you want to be using the pencil tool so over here on the left you may be seeing your brush tool right click on that brush tool and select the pencil tool down in the bottom left of course you can change your colors i'm just going to use black for the silhouette which is the first thing that we want to draw the outline of our character and you may want to just practice here i drew everything with the mouse you can use a pen pad if you'd like but essentially you're just drawing into these squares like this you also want to set up your eraser tool so for example click on your eraser up here in the top left you're going to see this mode usually it'll be on block or brush make sure you set that to pencil if you look on the right side of the screen you're going to see your layers right now we just have this background layer you don't want to be drawing on your background layer so we're going to click this button in the very bottom right to create a new layer over top if you'd like you can hide your background layer select layer 1 and just draw over top of the transparency if it's a little bit too hard to see things you could also show your background layer again grab your paint bucket tool and add some sort of a background i was going for this palish yellow background again just so you can see a little bit better we're gonna hide that layer at the end once we export so go ahead and select layer one grab your pencil tool and let's start drawing now the key for beginners is using reference images you need to understand how pixel art is drawn if you guys are good at drawing you can go ahead and just start freestyle drawing the silhouettes by looking at your reference images and trying to replicate it by hand if that's a little bit too tough for you guys i'm going to show you this awesome shortcut what i did was look up pokemon sprite templates and you can find all of these reference images of different art styles with different angles different walk cycles and even different poses make sure if you guys do want to use these you look into the usage rules or terms and conditions so you can see for this one here a lot of people provide them for free so make sure you are crediting them the one that i'm using in particular is from max loose leaf sprite generator so i'll be sure to put the credit in the description of this video so go ahead and find a style that you'd like of course we're going to be designing it all ourselves we're going to be adding the eyes closed customizing etc but being able to trace around this will give you a solid base you can right click and save the image or copy it and just ctrl v into photoshop and just looking at this you see you have your standard position taking a step with the right foot and taking a step with the left foot that's all we need here if you guys need to you could scale this down a tiny bit just be careful because the more you scale these down the more the quality will be crunched so we're going to draw three images the second two will be a lot easier because all we need to do is really change the arms and the legs we're going to start with the standard position here so center this create another new layer over top so in the bottom right click the plus sign let's rename that to our character and layer one to reference so you should have the reference image in one and then your blank layer that we're going to draw on which we've now selected grab your pencil tool choose a color i'm going to go with black and draw the silhouette the outline of this position once you have that outlined down it's really up to you how you want to design the look and feel of your character that's the most fun part in my opinion so once you've drawn your silhouette go ahead and hide your reference image and now you can see you have an easy base to start designing your own character and again keep using those reference images i looked through this music video and tried to recreate some of the pants the shirts that i saw here it should be fairly simple all we need to do is grab a color so i'll go with something like a darker gray for the shirt use your reference image to make sure you're drawing in the right proportions select your layer grab your pencil tool we're just going to draw a little bit of a shirt line here to save time you guys could use the paint bucket fill tool but you'll see on these edges it bleeds a little bit so you can either erase those with your eraser or you can just fill in the outline first and then use the paint bucket tool so up to you guys i found that i don't really need the grid at this point you can if you need to but if you want to see it a little more crisp go to view again check off extras so let's go ahead and add in some eyes here i'm going to change my primary color just to white grab my pencil tool and then again using your references you can even keep your reference layer up select your main top layer and just draw in the exact same squares like this and then whenever you hide the reference you're still drawing on your top layer not the reference so you can easily just fill things in like that if you really are messing up with placement or positioning or of course you could just go freestyle the entire thing here and add your own eyes facial features whatever now that you have the silhouette you guys could also go in and add the skin color so we'll choose a sort of darker color such as this my main tip for freestyling is just try and keep each side consistent so you see where the line is here just try and eyeball that and match it on the other side again we can use our paint bucket tool fill in the face here and then get rid of some of these edges with our eraser tool so you guys can see really how simple it is to start building out this character i added a little bit of red on the edges for the shoes here at this point it's really just your own creative decisions on where you'd like to put the colors off to a great start now we're going to add one of the more complicated things to do by hand and that is the hair again we're going to eyeball a lot of our reference images and then we're going to get into some details we'll further explain that more once we add in the animation of him walking so we make those other two images the left step in the right step so if we take a look at some of the hair that you're trying to create here you always want to start with that hairline straight line there's another straightforward angle so that's straight hairline and then start to give it a little bit of easy angle so if you're trying to replicate that again trial and error if you do something on the left side replicate the exact same click on the right side if you need to turn on your grid once again so here's a little time lapse of me creating the hair another tip make sure the hair isn't going too far away from the head you don't want things to look disproportionate once you have the basic silhouette just fill in the rest with your base color so now that we have the base colors for our character finished let's go ahead and start adding the shadows and the highlights again this will make everything look a lot more detailed all you need to do is grab your color picker select the color in our case the face and just drag it down a little bit to darken it then you can start drawing in around the outline and this part really is just understanding how light reacts with certain things check out some of the videos i linked below where they talk about using highlights using shadows making your pixel art look a lot better these tips will help you a huge amount in the long run so start adding in your shadows to the face to the shirt and the pants again keep looking at your reference images if you need help with this you don't need to make things too complicated just make a couple little squares i even drew in a little accessory here with this gold chain once you've added the shadows take that exact same concept for the highlights so you want to pick the color you want to brighten it up a little bit by dragging it to the left towards that white again always using those reference images and paying attention to the symmetry of everything once i added my shadows and my highlights i also added a couple of these face tattoos because this is pixel you don't have to get too crazy with it just add a couple of darker squares around the face so now you've completed stage one of our animation now that you've done that the next two parts are going to be a lot easier so all you need to do is take your reference image that we used to line up everything before and duplicate it by selecting it and clicking ctrl j we duplicate just so that we don't change the positioning of the original grab the duplication ctrl t to transform it and drag it over and try and line up the next walking image to line everything up easier change the little opacity slider above the layer what i did was try and line up the chin of the character to make sure i knew that was the right position so once you've lined it up go ahead and create another new layer and on this new layer what we're going to do is just silhouette the arms and the legs of our second reference image so here's a little time lapse of me doing that once you've drawn the arms in the legs what i did was duplicated my original layer the first standard position for a character and i just went in and erased the arms and the legs off of that duplication again we're duplicating so that we don't mess up the original make sure you're always duplicating you don't want to make a mistake and accidentally delete some work have to redo something so you should have your duplication with the erased arms and legs and then you should have your second layer which has the new arms and legs once you've done that just go ahead and fill in the colors that you set up before click between your layers to look at the reference to make sure all of the colors and placements line up and start filling in those exact same colors the only difference here is adding a little bit of variation with the shadows the highlights because your character is bending in a different way for example if your right leg is stepping forward you want to add a little bit of shadow to that leg to reinforce the fact that it's going forward such as a couple dots to represent a knee or a specific bend so here's what i did for that another quick tip here if you want to add a bit more bounce to your character once we do add the animation you can take certain things such as the chain or even the hair and just move a couple of the pixels to make it look like it's bouncing up to make it look like it's bouncing up you literally just move everything up one pixel you can use your selector tools or you can just erase them and redraw it so here's what i did with the chain just to make them look bounced up a little bit that'll be more apparent at the end once we do piece the animation together so you've successfully completed the second image that we're drawing now let's repeat those exact same steps for the third again a quick little summary you use your reference image and line it up with your standard position you make another duplication of your standard you want to create a new layer for the silhouette meaning the arms and legs of our third walk cycle image here's me renaming everything just to keep everything organized lower the opacity on your reference and fill in that third silhouette again fill in your base colors fill in your highlights and your shadows so once you guys have completed your three images we'll do a quick little run through here of the layer structure so again you have your standard position the first image that you drew after that you should have the second duplication i'll rename that to one two and three so two this is what it should look like remember we erase the arms and the legs and we also have up here our walk too which brings back the arms and the legs so this is your second image and then the exact same here's three with the arms and the legs erased and then here's the new arms and the legs for walk three very simple those are your three images that we need for our walking animation that's it now let's go ahead and actually create that animation to do that what we're going to do is we're going to scale up our images the reason we're doing this is because remember this is 47 by 64. if you were to create an hd final image with this dimensions it would be very tiny so we're going to scale this up so that we don't lose any resolution so show image number one because again we're going to save three images we're going to go in the top left to the image tab and we're going to click image size so you want to change this value on the right it should be defaulted onto pixels go ahead and put that up to percent next you want to check on resample and very important so that you don't lose quality make sure that this is on nearest neighbor hard edges and we're going to take the width and height make sure that that has the little link and we'll put that on something like 1200 we can zoom out here to see the little preview so at twelve hundred percent this is five six four by seven six eight let's make it a little bit bigger maybe two thousand nine forty by twelve eighty should be solid if you want you can make it a little bit bigger it's up to you guys but if we click ok and we zoom out you can see we've now enlarged our image without losing any quality so make sure you do that step because it's very important once you've done that let's go up to file save as and you're going to want to save this as a png again this is our first image here so i just named that walk one once you save that first image go ahead and just show the layers for our second so here's the base here is the legs that we drew in the entire canvas is already scaled up so we can just go to file save as again png you want to export with this transparent background and again if you're not seeing those transparent edges make sure that your background layer is hidden just by clicking the visibility so save image two and then the exact same with image three to show the base for image three with the arms and legs erased and then the arms and legs drawn in so once you have those three images saved we're going to go up to file open and we're going to open up those hd images that we just saved so we're going to open up walk 1 hd and that way the camera size is matching everything correctly this time we're going to create a little animation so let's open up the folder where we save those three images so here's walk one walk two walk three just want to drag all three of them in there so let's drag in walk two click the check mark and let's drag in walk three and click the check mark as well so they're all stacked on top of each other go ahead and just hide the visibility of those for now to create a little animation of him walking all in photoshop you want to go up to window in the top left and you want to make sure that timeline is checked on so right down here timeline go ahead and check that it should pop up this big window go ahead and just click create video timeline so with this video timeline we can easily chop up these layers place them one after the other to create our little walk cycle so let me walk you through doing that you'll see these three little lines in the top of our window if you click that go ahead and just make sure enable timeline shortcut keys is checked on what i did was move five frames so drag this over one two three four five select layer one which is our our first idle position and just click the scissors to make a cut once you've done that everything to the right of this cut you can just select and delete so now let's show the visibility for our other two layers here we're going to take walk two and just start it right where that cut is we'll move walk three over as well and you see kind of what i'm doing here so now that i've made that cut and just reposition the layers if i scroll through see how it goes from the standby to our walk too just by switching like that now what i did was actually make the walking frames have a little bit more timing that way you can see the stride a little bit better and of course again it's all up to the way you want to time this you don't have to cut it the exact same way i did so because i made this five frames i'm gonna make the walk to 10 frames so using my arrow keys one two three four five six seven eight nine ten click the scissors right at that position and then delete everything to the right of that cut for walk two so a common mistake here is putting walk three right after walk two so instead of going from walk two to walk three like this we're actually going to duplicate layer one and kind of put it between those that way it looks like you step forward you reset the position and you step with the other leg so let's select layer one and we're just going to click control j to duplicate it and let's take that duplication and just set it right after walk two and again move five frames one two three four five and make our cut and delete the excess now we can take walk three move ten frames like we did with walk two so one two three four five six seven eight nine ten make a cut and delete the excess so now that you've cut the frames up like that you guys can click this little gear on the left and just check on loop playback and if you press play you can see our little stride animation that we have here where it looks like he's progressively moving forward and if you remember earlier whenever we changed the position of that necklace and just made it move up one frame here's what that looks like whenever you play it back with the animation it looks like it has a little bit of that bounce and speaking of adding a bit more bounce because this looks like he is walking in place we're going to actually hold down control on our keyboard and just select this walk to and holding down control select walk three so both of them are selected once you've done that we're gonna click control t to transform and let's just move that up like a couple of pixels so just drag it a tiny bit up click your check mark so now we're gonna have a little bit of bump on the stride as you can see a little bit of bounce and our walk animation is pretty much complete we're gonna export this out bring it into after effects and start building a bit of backgrounds the great thing about photoshop in after effects because it's all part of the adobe suite you don't even have to render this out you can actually just file save this exact project file so for example i named this block animation finished and when you do go into after effects you can just drag in the photoshop project file and you'll still see the animation just like that it sort of creates this dynamic link so if you were to go back into the project files say for example you wanted to change anything you could go into photoshop change something and then when you're in after effects you'll see it automatically update from there alright guys so in after effects you just want to click new projects and we're going to create a new composition by clicking this button 1920 by 1080 is fine and we'll click ok so open up the folder where you saved the project file or the final rendered animation go ahead and just drag that right into our project bin in after effects so here you can choose if you want to merge all the layer styles into footage or editable layer styles i just merged it all into footage so we'll click ok it puts it into this little easy composition for us so we can just grab that and drag it in and you see our nice hd file size if i click play there's our animation i'm going to go ahead and select that layer and click s and just scale that down so you see the animation is a little bit short it's only a couple of seconds so we can just select that and click control d to duplicate it and just line those up so that you have this sort of seamless loop going on you guys can just keep repeating those steps ctrl d move them over so to keep everything cleaned up you guys could just select all of these layers right click and pre-compose them that'll put them into one single clip so i'll name that character walk just like that and there you go that's the easy way to create our character now if you guys want to create those backgrounds i'm going to quickly take you through how i did that so back in photoshop for a background i'm gonna go to file new and again in my 47 by 64 pixels canvas here we'll click create don't need a timeline for any of this because we're not adding any animation but of course you guys could use that whole animation section of this tutorial to add any animated pixel props backgrounds whatever i'll click in the bottom right to make a new layer and on that new layer with my pencil tool i started off just by drawing this little square if you use some of those other softwares that i mentioned at the beginning such as ae sprites they actually have a lot of really useful tools like tiling which can help a lot but this was still pretty simple i drew my square and then within my square i just started drawing these little rock like shapes once i drew my rock like shapes i just chose the sort of rock like dull gray color and started filling those in so again you can use your paint bucket tool and then you can even draw in a couple of highlights you can go to green and just add in a couple of these little vines in between in the black here once you have that initial square i just selected that layer and clicked control j to duplicate it and then i click ctrl t to move that new layer and i just sort of made this stack of this repeating texture you want to you want to make it so that the stack kind of takes up this entire column or row and then again just continuing to ctrl j to duplicate those just fill it up so that it fills the entire length of our canvas at this point you can merge all of these layers into one shift-click to select them all right click and merge layers and then from here you can draw in any extra detail if you'd like and then go up to image image size and use that tip that we're using before to actually scale this up so i'll put that up to like 2 000 make sure nearest neighbor hard edges is on and click ok so go ahead and file save as that image this is a very rushed pathway there's a lot of nicer ways to make something like this but it should work fine for what we're doing we're going to save this as a png as well in adobe after effects let's open the folder where we save that and we'll drag that into our project bin and then let's drag that into our composition and you always want to make sure the path is beneath the character layer so just drag that underneath and now you can see our character walking on our path now a quick easy little trick that i used just to add a bit of movement here you see if i press play it's just an image so it's just standing there to add a bit of rolling movement to the path i went to my effects and presets and i search for the offset effect so under distort right here we're going to take offset and place that on our path and then in the top left in our effect controls see the shift center too you can shift it horizontally but in our case we want to shift vertically you see we can move the path and it just continues on and on easy as that to make a little animation of it moving we're going to start at the beginning of our timeline and in the top left just set a keyframe for the shift center 2. so click this keyframe now we're going to drag to the end of our animation and we're just going to take this value and start moving that to the negative so i think i made that something like negative 200 so we created a little simple animation of our path moving just like that to make this not so blocky and make it look a little bit more like a floating path so in the top left i just use my rectangle tool you can actually alt click if you're not seeing that shape so select the rectangle tool and i just drew a mask sort of on the edge like this now this mask is set to add so if we look down here change your mask from add to subtract so it'll cut away also make another mask on the other side so we'll just take that and i'm just gonna eyeball it like that put that to subtract and maybe adjust so that those are even so an easy way just to add some variation to the shape of the path i also added some shadows on each side of this by doing the exact same thing with masks but in a duplicated layer so select path control d to duplicate going to go to my effects and presets and just search for brightness we'll drag that onto path shadow we'll just lower the brightness make sure you take that mask 3 that says add and drag it above the two subtraction masks and then to add one on the other side you can just select that mask three ctrl d to duplicate it and then let's hold ctrl and drag the other shadow to the other side easy as that path looks a lot better less blocky now taking a look at our reference here again the stars play this you see there's some moving stars in the foreground these brighter ones but then there's also these darker kind of faded out stars in the back and that creates this illusion of depth here's what i did to create these stars just repeated the exact same steps as last time where i make a new canvas here with the exact same small pixelated size and i sort of just looked at the stars in the original music video and just tried to replicate that with the bright center they're really just a couple of dots so it should be very easy to create something like this the key to creating the depth is saving the image first with the background and then removing the background and saving it again as a png that way we have stars we can position in the foreground with that transparent background and then we have the one with our darker background so in after effects drag in the darker background version and of course drag that layer to the bottom so it's beneath everything and just position those on each side you can pre-compose those together if you want to connect them into one layer to make it faded out i just lowered the brightness value and i also lowered the opacity a bit so that that background color wasn't fully fading out i also just added a little solid with the exact same color as our star background and then i dragged in my transparent star pngs that i saved after the original and i started positioning those over top that way we have the faded out stars in the back that aren't moving as much and we have the brighter stars in the front you can add motion to those stars as well just by using that exact same little offset effect method that we used on the path creating a little keyframe so rewind the video for the path if you need help with that and that's really about it guys the only other thing i did was hop back into photoshop just drew a little black shadow around his feet i saved only the black shadow and when you drag that into after effects you can actually change the blending mode to something like multiply so that it looks like there's a shadow underneath her character as he walks again the thing that i love the most about this is you can take all the steps that we showed you here and make so many different looking things it doesn't just have to be in one style see in betrayal they have so many different styles of it where you have the close-up you have the og pokemon smaller character then they also have this sort of in-between where you have a bit more detail so again have fun with that guys comment down below if you do want to see a part two maybe diving more into pixel arts as always guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you in the next [Music]

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 254,929

Keywords: create, tutorial, adobe, photoshop, after effects, pixel, pixel art, visualizer, music video, pokemon style, animations, trippie, redd, drake, betrayal, super cell, lyric video, molly heart, mp5, after, effects, the, weeknd, animation, light, tunnel, vj, loop, premiere, max novak, editing, element, 3d, best, top 10, preset, pack, plugin, free, glitch, vhs, overlay, transition, car, c4d, cole bennett, justin odisho, the weekend, how to make a 3d music video, ae, glow, music visualizer, peter mckinnon, cinecom, corridor

Id: ZNBILpF1j-0

Length: 27min 39sec (1659 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021