Post by Margo May Kane on Apr 9, 2012 23:45:56 GMT -5
A lot of people have asked how I did this dressage shot from my show entry, and since Christina asked every so nicely to make a tutorial--here you go!
This is possibly the most important part of this tutorial so PAY ATTENTION!! (Rawr!)
1. Decide upon an angle for the shot using "Tab Mode/Camera Mode". You can move forward-back with W-S, left-right with A-D, up-down with Q-E, angle left-angle right with Shift+Q-Shift+E.
2. When you have an angle, press Ctrl+5 (though any number between 5-9 will work). This will save the angle.
3. EXIT TAB MODE. This is important--the game does its best to save the angle, but sometimes it is a few pixels off, so to have each screenshot exactly the same, you'll want to exit and come back to the angle.
4. To load the angle, re-enter Tab Mode and hit Shift+5. Tada! Now every time you hit Shift+5 in Tab Mode, you'll go to that exact angle.
5. Now, hopefully you have your scene already all set up, but this is when you take your two seperate shots--so if it's set up, take Shot 1. As per my example, I wanted to combine the hat and bun--so in one shot she wore the hat, in one shot she wore the bun. I wanted to combine the head from one part of the animation with the body of the other, so I changed all that, then went back and took Shot 2.
6. Once you've exited the game, open both files in Photoshop or whatever other editing program you use. NOTE: The program must allow the creation of seperate layers for this to work!
7. Go to the shot that contains the majority of what you want to KEEP. (In my case, the majority was the shot of the body posing.) Copy THIS image, switch to the other shot, and paste it directly on top--if your editing program requires you to make a new layer, do that first.
8. With the top layer selected, take the eraser tool and begin erasing through to the parts of the image you want from the lower layer. (NOTE: If you know how to do this using a layer mask instead, that would be preferable in case you accidentally erase too much, but I won't explain how to do that this tutorial.)
9. Make sure to be careful when erasing; be very mindful of things like the shadow, reins, mane, hat brim, etc. They may seem minor, but it's the little things that can make the difference between a flawless image and an obviously edited image.
10. Also make sure to use the right brushes for erasing; around the hair/hat I use a hard-edged eraser to be more exact, while on the neck I used a soft-edged fuzzy eraser for better blending of the muscles/mane/reins.
11. Flatten the image.
12. The blending of the two images will never be perfect, so after you've erased what you need, use the smudge tool to smooth things out (for example, at the very bottom of the mane you can see a little patch of sky I had to cover up), or anything other tool you use for touchups such as the brush tool, healing tool, or blur tool.
13. Make any edits you need to, now. In this case, I changed the mane, blurred the background, used an action, and totally forgot to add the eye shine to Bean's eye. Whoops.
14. Save!
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Aaaaand there you go! See, that wasn't hard!
Also, for those that are curious--the animation that Bean is doing in both shots is the standing idle "Unicorn Heroic Pose".
Hope you guys learned a little something! ♥
Plus your pictures are always gorgeous to look at.
