#Mage tutorial

[loustica-lucia]

Heroes of the Dragon Age

An animation I've made for Dragon Age Day 2023, featuring my main Warden (Alyssa Cousland-Theirin), Hawke (Eleena Amell Hawke) and Inquisitor (Sulevin Lavellan)!

It's to this day one of my best artwork and I thought I should share it here too! 90+ hours between the original sketch, outfit design, the rough animation, rotoscope, inking, flat-colours, background shading and even the audio :')

Interested in the process? I detailed it below since it was my first time doing something like that:

I would like to start by saying I'm not a professional animator!Everything you've seen here is the result of experimentation and a lot of practice to learn and understand how 2D animation works.

My first idea started in May 2023. I just finished rewatching DA Absolution for the X time, and wanted to analyse why I loved the intro so much. (Even after countless rewatch, I never skipped it once.) I was inspired to study it with my main three protagonists!

Then came the first test with Alyssa Cousland-Theirin, my Hero of Ferelden! I tried to understand which part to separate for the animation. Mainly the hair and cape because it flows a lot more than the rest! If I recall, my first idea here was to make her counter flame attacks (?). Then, as the camera turns around her, I tried to add a grid to know how the camera would work around it.

I ended up making the clip longer, so she could position herself to the further left and leave space to the two other protagonists.

Now it was time to try to animate Sulevin Lavellan, my Inquisitor. I really kept that quick doodling style just to capture the vibe without putting too much time/effort into it! The background would be static to contrast with Alyssa's. I also loved the idea of a rogue sneaking!

Instead of working on Eleena Amell Hawke, my Champion of Kirkwall, I went back to Alyssa and started working with Clip Studio Paint 3D models (this entire animation has been done on the EX version of the software!) It helped for rotoscope animation and maintaining likeness! That's when I got the idea to make the background swirl around the character to let the eyes be guided by the rest of the screen!

After a couple more hours, I planned the entire animatic with 3D models and quick doodles! I finally found a cool pose for Eleena Hawke, which was honestly the hardest of the three to imagine for some reason? I tried many other poses but ended up picking an animation from the game!

This whole time, I was studying a bunch of background ideas and how studio Red Dog Culture House (who made Absolution) work! Thankfully, they have a YouTube Channel where they shared some BTS content so I could analyse it!

Then, I simplified my character and their original designs in the style of the studio! These outfits are how I imagine them after Trespasser. Alyssa as the Queen of Ferelden, looking for a cure to the Calling, Hawke following Fenris to Tevinter & Sully as a Red Jenny Inquisitor!

The idea for Sulevin's animation actually came from a piece I doodled on a live stream, when I was drawing pose studies and turning them into finished artworks haha As for Alyssa, I wanted to draw the fight that got her facial scars!

Once their designs were ready and the background ideas too, I made the rough version of the animation! Basically a sketch done on top of the 3D models to add the details, staying pretty rough just to capture the idea and movements.

Then it was time to start the lines! I decided make a folder per frame, so I could separate all he main elements and draw them one by one. It helps keeping the likeness of a character in the different frames without having big "jumps" between frames! In fact, every parts were coloured differently to recognize them, and then I used vector erasers and masks (Ah yes, the entire lineart is done in vectors of course! It's easier to adjust and save time when working on similar frames!)

At first of course, everything overlaps! But I find it easier to draw too much and erase after, just to make sure everything is coherent in each frames! The cool thing about CSP is how you can change the colour of the layers in one click! So all the coloured lines turned into black in one second, and I could reverse it just as quickly to double check!

Then I started working on Sulevin! I made a blue line to mark where her feet were, as the sketch in the background wasn't perfectly straight! (Like Sulevin's sexuality 🤭😂) The silhouettes were very quick to do, but I had fun adding more & more details as she came closer to the foreground!

I really wanted to add that little dagger trick, but I remember it required me to change the pacing of Eleena's apparition, as it was recovering her arm too quickly! I had to change the pace of multiple frames quite a lot during the project, to make sure the flow was right! For Eleena, most of her animation remained around her arms and the staff itself, as magic would be the most difficult part! That way each character has their own focus: Alyssa has a very animated background, Sulevin got the grappling hook and Eleena the ice!

Then it was time to start adding colours! Just like for the lineart, I separated every colour on it's own layer, so I could easily adjust the colours later if needed. I added one colour at the time, going through all the frames, and then another colour!

I made full palette tests with the colours I would use for their background at this point, checking if the details remained readable! Alyssa was the most challenging in terms of clothes, because I made her a very detailled armour! I had to simplify the Theirin heraldry, vectorize/redraw the Cousland, and make a brush for her cape's pattern!

Once I was done adding the flatcolours, I started the background, and oh boy it was a wild ride. For the cave, I painted multiple tests. I imagine was to use CSP panorama tools, which transform a texture into a 3D sphere, so each corners must match to look good. Sadly, it made the background very blurry, so after hours of testing, I changed ideas. Instead of the random fire balls (?) I originally imagined for Alyssa, I made three simple frames of a Rage Demon to attack her.

I ended up using the cave as a repeated pattern to make it turn 360° around the character. For Eleena, I mixed inspiration from the comics, Dreadwolf & Absolution, using warm colours matching Hawke's signature red. Just like I made the cave very grey/blue to match Grey Wardens. For Val Royeaux, it was more complex because I wanted to make it green, matching the Inquisitor's signature green. But bright green couldn't work, and the original colour during day time was blue/white/gold. So I added more leaves, played around the design a bit! After adding the rage demon, I made the shading! It was surprisingly easy and quick to do now!

I clipped a white layer on the flatcolours to not be distracted by the colours, and made thin lines to separate the light/shadows, then simply filled everything with the bucket tool! Then you set the layer to multiply and remove the white layer, and you have celshading shadows! Now the character looks out of the picture, so I added layers of blue in color burn, saturation and substract blending modes to make her look like she's in the right setting! Of course, I did the same with the other two, giving Hawke a red overlay and Sulevin green shadows!

Then I added the details, it went from white irises, to sword/staff smears to earrings and smaller finition that goes on top of these layers. To add the lights, I simply selected the shadows and reversed the selection! Using warm and cold tones to create contrast with the purple/bluish shadows! I also added more ambient light layers for Alyssa to reflect the Rage Demon fire. Now it was time to add ice magic! My first attempt had too many frames, making it look weird! Sometimes it's better to lower the frame rate to make things less bumpy!

Then I downloaded some cool ice brushes on CSP assets that made it look less like blue magical flames! But when I covered the screen in ice, I realized "Oh wait, I could make a cool transition from the ice, to blue lyrium turning red?"Red Lyrium truly links these three games and The Veilguard somehow! I spent the next hour painting over the idol and putting it in a black background, with lyrium and then the golden Dragon Age title text.

For the SFX, I used free youtube libraries sounds & "Darkspawn!" comes from the violent human female voice set (iconic for ""Can I get you a ladder? So you can get off my back!"😂🤭) After editing all that, the animation was finally done!

Here's the final math:

About 15 hours for the sketching/rough/animatic phase, 30h for the lineart, 25h for colours, 10h for backgrounds, 5h for details & 5h for music & SFX, for a total of 90 hours. Aka the same amount of time it took me to finish Baldur's Gate 3 the first time lol

If you have any question regarding the animation or the softwares etc. do not hesitate to ask, I'll do my best to answer!

[froggos-are-superior]

Webtoon screenshots out of context: part 9

[deafeninggardenerpanda]

woke: thinking drawing the mages weapons is hard

woke: thinking drawing the mages bodies and clothes is hard

woke: thinking drawing the mages hair is hard someone please for the love of god give me a tutorial this isnt a joke im suffering so hard someone help

[magebird]

There’s no use in running unless you run like heck

The best things in life we learned from the wreck

[ID: Trigun fanart depicting Vash against a rippled background like sand dunes. Only Vash’s head and hands are defined as he leans forward in a run, his gun held low. The rest of his shape is vaguely defined in smudges of color with streaks trailing off as if in a motion blur. End ID.]

[oopsallmabari]

in recognition that i have been On One today i do want to say that the combat in veilguard has really grown on me!!!! i think that it took me a while to learn+get comfy with but now that i'm more used to it i'm comfortable going out w/o a companion set up to heal me. i feel pretty good about strategizing w party comp and what skills/runes to slot in. i'd consider trying to up the difficulty to hard mode in my future runs.

[pallas-cat]

i love less conventionally attractive solasmancing lavellans don't get me wrong the modded ethereal looking ones are GORGEOUSSSS but i loved playing a roughened up, scarred, choppy haired warrior lavellan who thinks she has it all figured out but whose entire world is shaken by this man

[jbcrochetwizard]

Final Fantasy crochet pattern bundle!  Set includes 3 photo tutorial patterns of iconic characters from the series; a moogle, baby chocobo and black mage.

Etsy | Ravelry

[risingsunresistance]

so far i've only used the hyperion to kill worms, which is exactly how i think this game was meant to be played

[grimwarden]

hate early hinterlands where they club you in the head with templars and mages fighting without reason and how we should just raze through them all

[priestblaster]

my half baked DAO doodles i'll never touch up... still need to beat the game T-T

[bunflora]

something happened last night

[nisphar]

Everyone loves Gandalf, so I thought I'd add some more of him to you guys' feeds :D

[identitycrysys]

[knife-eared-jan]

Ok, as much as I have been hyping and playing 12 hours a day since it got out (still in Act 1 though, bc I'm a slowass player and completionist), I feel like I have to say something that is getting hard to ignore at this point... and I wanna preface this by saying that I am loving a lot of aspects of the game and I adore the writing when it comes to the companions, who I am obsessed with.

And maybe this will get better yet, as I generally heard the writing picks up once the story progresses beyond picking up all companions..

But I'm starting to get quite upset at the way the writing just does NOT care about the established lore and the politics of Thedas like at all, when to me - and many others - that richness, nuance and depth of the world is what makes the games so special.

(Spoilers below)

I looked past the way the elves in Arlathan just seemed to know that their gods are evil and Solas is "kind of a dick" but was right about that. When, you know, that made him basically the Satan of their pantheon up to now.. It was after all the tutorial stage of the game and I understand that you wanna ease newcomers into the lore. I could also handwave it in-universe with Morrigan being there - she could have filled the Veiljumpers in on the discoveries of the Inquisition or even what the Well told her.

It felt a bit weird that our contacts in every other faction just accepted this huge revelation without a blink, but again it was the early stages and I also get that having a discussion about it 6 times with different faction leaders would have been incredibly tedious. So I ignored that. And yeah, at least the First Warden found it hard to swallow.

The fact that they brushed aside the gods finding elven subjects - many of whom after all still worship them - with one sentence from Solas was disappointing though. Instead they chose to ally them with the Venatori and the Antaam who are the pure evil factions with no nuance or motive to side with them besides a comic book level of hunger for power. They didn't even throw in a sentence about the gods maybe speaking to the Venatori through the Archdemons to get them on their side or how it's very ironic that the Venatori, who want to make Tevinter great again, stoop to working with the pantheon of the people they oppress because they see them as lesser and other. No political exploration of the massive lore implications at all.

It really hit me when I picked up Davrin and he commented how Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain blighting the world would really endear us (elves) to the rest of Thedas - this was the first time anyone actually mentioned the political impact of the elven gods being real, freed, evil and blighted on modern day elves at all, when this should be HUGE. It should be ugly. It should be complex. It should be explored in as many examples as bloodmagic and the oppression of mages was in DA2. It should be a central point of Act 1. (This btw made me love Davrin so much in that moment because this was the first time in the game for me when I actually felt like talking to a Dragon Age elf and even just that one line felt like home.)

And now I just did Taash's first companion quest and it seems Qunari lore is also being ignored (except for the gender aspect of it, which I look forward to). Taash's mum was a scholar and had a baby and the only problem about that was that it could breathe fire and was special but otherwise all would have been dandy? Like she would have just been allowed to keep Taash long enough to find that out about her baby if she was living under the Qun? That directly contradicts everything we know about how the Qunari's culture around reproduction and childcare works.

Sorry to be negative and talking myself into a rage - I know it's not something people want to see rn. But like, I realise you have to brush over some lore intricacies for brevity and to make it digestible for new players. But this is a world initially inspired by Wheel of Time and ASOIAF, both of which are interesting because of the depth of ficitional cultures, lore and politics, and hence it's also what gives Dragon Age its appeal. And now they take us to the most politcally interesting areas on the world map and just get rid of all of political depth?

That's really disappointing. Imagine if Winds of Winter dropped all political themes just because there's several previous books and it's been some a lot of years.

Also, I managed to play DA2 before I ever played Origins and they could introduce me to a vast established background of lore just fine back then.

Sorry. Rant over. But I had to get that out of my system.

[albaharu]

The adventures of Inquisitor Maddox : Part 3

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We finished the tutorial B)

Also I will say, (ASUNDER SPOILERS) they said that Pharamond (only know ex tranquil mage) was dangerous and inestable and summoned demons for being an ex-tranquil BUT the demons were actually only summoned before he was healed so thats slander and lies, that guy wasn't even throwing fireballs to the divine when she ordered to make him tranquil again. but also summoning demons when your feelings are too much go vrrrrrrr so im doing it

[mysteryshoptls]

Ruggie Bucchi Shared Lines

Tutorial: You'll miss out if you just stick around here. Hurry, let's go.

Level Up 1 / Buddy Level Up: Sheeheehee, ain't this nice!

Level Up 2: What a weirdo, tryin' to take care of me like this...

Level Up 3: Guess I'll try ta get even stronger.

Level Max: Right now, I feel like I can do anythin'. Guess it ain't a bad thing to put in a little effort once in a while. Hehehe.

Vignette Level Up: Ain't you a good-natured sucker～ It ain't my problem if it all backfires on ya. Well, maybe I can help ya depending on what it is.

Spell Level Up: I always thought my magic'd never amount to nothin' good... Looks like I can get by.

Friendship Level Up: You wanna know if I’ll come back again? Hey, ’s long as it’s free, I’ll come anytime! And hey, if I get some snacks out of coming here too, that’d be even better. Shishishi.

Friendship Level Max: I gotta make sure to thank ya for always invitin’ me. Oh right, let me know if any of your furniture breaks. Not sayin’ I’ll do it for free, but I can give you a friend’s discount to fix it.

Uncapped: Looks like I'm still maturin'. Guess I gotta keep ya around a little longer, huh.

Groovification: See, only crafty folk can survive in this world. It'll be good for you to stick around me, too.

Lesson Select 1: There ain't a class on hagglin'? Guess I shouldn't've expected that from some hoity-toity mage school.

Lesson Select 2: You don't gotta put too much thought into it. Ain'tcha super diligent.

Lesson Select 3: Which one're you pickin'? I'm def gonna pick out somethin' that'll be useful for survival.

Lesson Start: Let's go, time to study!

Lesson Finish: Whew, gotta make sure I don't get left behind.

Battle Start: This is my territory!

Battle Won: Seems like I’ll be having some delicious dinner!

Trouble 1: C'mon, I totally was gonna end it at just the right moment～

Trouble 2: I woulda been fine if we kept goin’ for a little longer, though?

GIFT CALENDAR 2023: “How will you be spending the day?” Obviously, I’m gonna be workin’! Today, I’m at a cake shop, and tomorrow I’m waitin’ tables at a restaurant… The holidays are coming up, so 'tis the season for a ton of high-payin’ temp jobs to fill my pockets, too! Shishishi!

Birthday Login Message 1: Today's the day I've been waiting for: my birthday! You got me a present, riiight? ...Wait, huh? You really got one for me? ...Uhhh, I really can't with how straight-forward that was. Well hey, thanks. Hehehe.

Birthday Login Message 2: Thanks for celebratin’ my birthday with me! Since it’s my big day, we should go grab some grub and… Ah! Oh noooooo, this is sooooo terrible, I forgot my wallet… I guess I can’t buy… Eh, you’ll treat me? Really? Maan, it’s really great having such a generous junior like you! C'mon, let’s go, let’s go. Shishishi～

Birthday Login Message 3: Whew, you really helped me out there, carryin’ the gifts I went n’ collected from the other students ‘round campus. Eh? You helpin’ me was your gift…? Wait, wait, wait, those are two totally different things! …Oh, you were kidding. Hey, you really hurt me just now, so you gotta give me another gift to make up for it, 'kay.

Birthday Login Message 4: Thanks for the birthday wishes! Sooo, I wonder whatcha got for mee~ Handmade donuts? Uh-huuuh. Y'know, I’m pretty particular about how my donuts taste… [chomps] Huhー this’s so good…! How’d youー!? It’s almost like it came from a… Ohhh, so these are handmade donuts from a pastry shop. That makes more sense.

Requested by Anonymous.