How's it made? - Art (Patreon)

In similar light to the Programming counterpart of this post, it's time to talk about how I draw all of the stuff in the game!

The thing that lets you make the thing! (Program)

I mainly use Clip Studio Paint, but really aside from a few convenient features, all you need is something that can draw. If you happen to be looking for some free painting software, I recommend the open-source Krita.

The art process.

I use a painterly approach when drawing, that is, instead of sketching out lines, I start out by blotting down a color. I define shapes and form by working in shadows at the same time. (Frequently switching between colors, I tend to use keyboard shortcuts a lot

(Here's what it looks like in action!)

This process results in a very sculpt-like feel. Although I tend to still infer lines as you can see, I typically add and properly accentuate them later into the piece.

Layers! So many layers!

The characters blink! They have facial expressions! They get fat! That means we should separate things into layers, so how do I have that set up?

(Here's what the typical layer structure looks like for a character sprite in the game.)

The body includes... well, the body. The clothes are separated as well... These are the two parts that require a sprite for each weight level, we'll go into more detail about that later. Then we have the rest: eyebrows, eyes, the mouth and finally: faceeffects, which is used for things like sweating, blushing, etc.

You might've also noticed the "Crop" layers. Since I have to export each of these parts separately, I end up having to put them back together in the game engine like some sort of paper doll. The crops are rectangles that define how big the image for each individual part is and I also use it as a guide to put things back together (but I should really look into writing something that does this for me, as I believe Unity has something akin to an .psd import that does this for you)

I have a template file that has all of these layers laid out like this, in fact, it's an entire folder with sub-folders structured in the way they are in the game files so I don't have to make them every time I add a character.

(Folder management!)

Now what we're all here for: the weight gain.

There needs to be a sprite for every 4 Weight. For a maximum of 52, that's 14 images. That's a lot! Don't forget that the clothes are on a separate layer, so if a character has more than one outfit, that's 14 images for each piece of clothing.

I start by completely drawing a character at their lowest weight. That is, finalized and fully rendered with shadows, lighting and whatnot. Then I just work my way upwards by copying the body layer and editing it with some... extra padding.

There's a bit of agonizing, repetitive work going on here, but I do my best to make it as clean as possible (it really isn't that bad.) Turns out there's a few features that are pretty useful for this!

This here is the Animation Timeline! I'm not much of a fan of hand-drawn animation myself (that's a job for people far more patient than me), but as it turns out: drawing a bunch of frames where something changes in the slightest way is a very similar process. Therefore using similar tools can be quite helpful. This way I can have each weight sprite laid out after one another and I can check how it looks by scrubbing between the frames.

And finally, the heart of the operation: Liquify. This is a deformation tool that is perfect for what we need here. Of course, it's not black magic: it makes things blurry, and fat doesn't work by just curving everything out. It is however an incredibly fast way to prepare the next frame, after which I can just paint over it and add or remove shadows, fat folds and others to finish the image. It's useful to separate the layers depending on where things intersect. For example: if you're deforming the chest, you wouldn't want to shift the arm behind it as well.

Clothes are done using a similar process. Whether I do each clothing frame at the same time as its body counterpart, or if I just do all of body and then all of clothes... well that depends on my mood, really.

Exporting is also a bit too much work

So now everything is drawn and ready to export... Except there's 14 frames of body and all of the small bits and pieces for the face.

For the body and clothes, since they are technically animations and their resolution is the entire canvas, I can just export all of the frames into an image sequence. Clip Studio has a few options for how these files will be named, the one I use is from 0000.png to 0013.png If you are unfamiliar with programming, things tend to begin from 0, rather than 1. It also maps well to the weight amounts, that is: sprite 0000.png is for Weight 0 = 0000 * 4. Sprite 0001.png would be Weight 4 = 0001 * 4 and so on.

Then for each of the face parts, I just copy the folder for them into a new Clip Studio file. Thanks to the crop layers, the new file will have the appropriate resolution and
then I just export them manually... (might want to look into a better method)

And that's all I can think of!

Once again thank you for reading and if you would like to know about anything in more detail, let me know!