Sig/Avatar tutorials by the makers [Index in First Post]

[Kaze]

Originally Posted by felix

Not really a wallpaper, it’s 100px too short of even 800 by 600.

Good job though, aim for bigger next time.

Originally Posted by Dist

Why do people even bother making 800x600 wallies at this time of age and day? Yeah sure, there may be people who still want to use so small wallies, but if you made it at 3x size of that, so 2400x1800, others could use it too who want larger resolution. If all of the work is done on computer I don't get why would you do it in small resolution to begin with >.<

Good work Kaze though. No offense intended with what I wrote above.

Originally Posted by felix

@Dist, it's because people have trouble finding good stock at that size.

I read the 1st line of text and I just wanted to tell you guys that the original image is 1920x1200 (My monitor size)
I re-sized it for these boards


*Edit*

After reading the comments, Haha sorry for posting the re-sized image in that case, if you wanted to use it in full resolution, I'd be happy to provide
And Dist, no offence taken at all! Why would I be offended by a friend of mine? (even though I'm absent a lot)

[felix]

Just post it to a site like post http://postimage.org/ then you won't need to waste time manually resizing.

[HyunA]

Originally Posted by Yuiichi

I'm pretty sure some of you have seen the sigs I have done with the font that mimics the Shuffle logo. If not, here's an example:



In this tutorial, I'll be showing you how to do this!

This tutorial was made in: Photoshop.

First of all, you need the correct font. The one I use is called Fat; the problem is I don't know where I found it. To fix this problem, I'm going to host it on some webspace I have Click here to download the font. If clicking on the link doesn't prompt you to save the file, right click and select Save Link As or Save Target As, depending on your browser.

(Tip: To install the font, copy it into your C:\Windows\Fonts directory.)

After thats done, get out the image you want to place the text on. Click the Horizontal Line Type Tool and click on your canvas. Make sure you have selected the Fat font and also have an appropriate font size selected. Don't worry about the colour just yet.

Spoiler for Step 2:

Type 1 letter, click another tool, and then click the Horizontal Line Type Tool again. Then click on the canvas away from your first letter. This will type each letter on a new layer (this is crucial for steps coming up).

Spoiler for Step 3:

Once you have all of your letters down, you can start changing the colours. You can change the colours by selecting the Horizontal Line Type Tool and highlighting each letter individually, and then clicking the colour picker. The Shuffle! logo follows a specific colour pattern for the letters, and we want to mimic this. Here is the colour pattern that you should follow. To make your letters this same colour, first save this image and open it in Photoshop. Then follow the above directions to change the colours and when in the colour picker, click on the colours in the pattern.

Spoiler for Step 4:

When all of your letters are coloured, you will want to start rotating them. Rotate each individual letter by selecting the layer, and clicking Edit > Transform > Rotate. The first letter should be rotated Left, second should be rotated Right, and so on. When each letter is rotated, line them up so that they "fit together". This might involve making one letter higher than the other.

Spoiler for Step 5:

When all the letters are lined up appropriately and you are sure you're happy with it, press Shift + Ctrl + E to merge all of the layers. Then duplicate the layer once. Warning! Once you merge your layers, the text is no longer editable. Be sure to make sure you're happy with what you've done before doing this step.

Spoiler for Step 6:

Now you're almost done. Select the bottom layer and click Layer > Layer Style > Stroke. Choose a Size of 5 and the colour black. Click OK. Then select the top layer and click Layer > Layer Style > Stroke. Choose a Size of 4 and the colour white. Click OK. If the layers aren't matched up properly, you'll see more black on one side than another. Choose the Move Tool and nudge (by using the arrow keys) the layer into proper position.

Spoiler for Step 7:

And there you have it! Shuffle! like text.

Can someone please link me directly to the font that was used for the Shuffle logo and the signature in this tutorial?

Thank you

[felix]

(by request)

Creating an Avatar

First start off by finding a post of yours. Found it? Take a screenshot. On windows press PrintScrn, on other system you will either have access to this same functionality or will have to install a separate program to do it; I'll let you google it.

Open Photoshop or Elements, select File / New..., you should see the dimentions of your screen already dialed in (on windows) otherwise just dial them in; make sure you're set to pixels. After everything is sorted, just hit Ok to accept and create a new photoshop document. Now press Ctrl+V or select Edit / Paste. IF you used a specialized program to take the screenshot, please just open the file created by that program by going though the File / Open dialog.

(sometimes Photoshop can have hicups, just paste into pain save and open the file)

Ok so now we have this big screenshot. We really don't need all of it. What we're interesting is really only our post, so we just crop that out, along with part of the signature to get a good view of how things look. Should now look something like this...



Ok now that's setup, we need to find us something to make the avatar out of.

Normally you want something like 20-30 images on which you apply the process bellow, but for simplicity I'll just show it for one. Namely this one http://www.zerochan.net/388417

What you want to look out for...

1. think in squares, the image might look good, but can you fit that goodness into a square?
2. avoid images with artifacts, scan lines, etc, more often then not it will mess them up bad when scaling down
3. certain styles look better then others when minituarized into an avatar; don't bother with artwork with very fine details, even if they manage to survive to 100 by 100, chances are they will be very unnoticeable, or WORSE very noisy and cluttered and hard to make sense of (if you never saw the original).

Ok so now that you got the image, just open it, via File / Open, and repeat the following over and over, until you feel you've exhausted all the possible angles at which you it would work as an avatar.

1. Press C for the Crop Tool
2. While holding Shift (for constraint proportions) draw a antline-square over the image
   
   
   
3. Twist and turn the squre (via the edges) after drawing it so that get more detail in (you should still be holding Shift)
   
   
   
4. After you're ok with it, hit Enter to crop the image.
5. If you angled the square the image will be rotated as well as cropped. If the angle is not really facing the right direction after the crop use the Image / Rotate Canvas options to tweak it. You might wish to do a horizontal flip even if it looks fine, just to make it look better.
   
   
   
6. Ok so it's cropped now... before doing anything, it's time to resize it. Go to Image / Image Size... and type in 100 in any of the two fields. Don't choose the sharpening option; its better if we do it manually. After you're done just RightClick / Actual Pixels just in case you got zoomed out or in.
7. Go to the Layer pallet (should be open, if it isn't press F7) select the background (ie. your crop) and press Ctrl+J to create a duplicate. Now select the duplicate and do the following...
8. Take the sharpening tool. You get to it by tapping Shift+R (it's the triangle one). Start sharpening details. What you want to do is avoid the face as much as possible and highlight everything else just enough make it unblur but not enough that you start to destroy the detail (you'll see the effect as lots of white pixels/noise).
   
   
   
   You can also play with the colors, to create better lighting and/or contrast. Feel free to experiment; you can always create a new copy via Ctrl+J on the background layer over and over; just make sure to drag this new layer to the top so it's the visible one.
9. Ok so you've tweaked your image; now open the history pallet, at the bottom you should see a little camera icon, click it to take a snapshot. You'll notice it adds another thumbnail at the top. The initial thumbnail is the original image, the new one is your changes, we'll call it the new revision/version. You can now click it to get back to it.
   
   
   
10. Repeat all the steps above and make lots of version.
    
    
    
    Once you're done and got lots of versions, time to test them out.
    
11. You should still have the screenshot open, select the "good" revisions and start dragging them into the screenshot; you'll get them as layers. Make sure they overlap your avatar.
    
    The reason you do this is two fold,
    • first off, the history pallet captures are only temporary; close the document and their gone; all except the one you had selected currently anyway; by dragging them into the document you keep them all
    • secondly its a color problem, you don't do borders before because you can't! not realibly. Sure a plain old 1px black border always works, everything else is iffy. Photoshop has a gray background (by default) but the forum has a yellow toned lightgray background, so dark looks darker on the forum, light looks lighter, as well as other combination of colors take effect. You can guess, or you can just overlap them over the screenshot and tweak it to be just right.
    
    Oh and it's far easier to switch in and out borders on all of them when doing it like this since the border is on a seperate layer and hence not directly integrated into the versions.
    
    I'll talk about them soon enough...
    
12. Now do some more filtering and get rid of all the ones that don't really fit into the space;
13. Then get rid of the ones that don't really look good with your signature
14. Then create a new layer on top (2nd botton on the left at the bottom of the Layer pallet), make a select of one of the avatar (just Ctrl+Click a layer of one) and create a border; then repeat this and create even more layers with border—use the eye icon to switch between them (you can drag select too).
15. Once you got a border and a selection start nitpicking at the ones that are left, until you find the best of the best.

Normally now you would move on to next candidate image, but since we're only doing one, it's all done.

[The Drunk Demoman]

Here's little tutorial I made today, I think it's easy to do.

Animated SEGA Font Tutorial

Spoiler:

The Gradient you will need (Big image)

Spoiler:

The Tutorial

Spoiler:

Outcome

[rinichan]

anyone knows how to make these

Spoiler for sample:

and this

and this

any tutorial. I'm using cs4 . anyone?

I want to make a sig like that how did they do that with background and a moving inside.

question is not mine qctually but we had the same question so i copied...

[JRendell]

Originally Posted by rinichan

anyone knows how to make these

Spoiler for sample:

and this

and this

any tutorial. I'm using cs4 . anyone?

I want to make a sig like that how did they do that with background and a moving inside.

question is not mine qctually but we had the same question so i copied...

Have a look on this thread's index (page 1).

We have alot of talented animation designers. Here's a tutorial of KiNA's if you're too lazy to look in the index.

[rinichan]

Originally Posted by JRendell

Have a look on this thread's index (page 1).

We have alot of talented animation designers. Here's a tutorial of KiNA's if you're too lazy to look in the index.

but I'm gonna start from scratch, Im gonna use a vid...



do u have any example that uses a vid to gif with the sample i used above ?

[Dist]

Maybe you should go back to the index and learn how to make animated avatars. When you got that covered, you will know how to make a signature such as above. And why avatars? Because those squares in your signatures are avatars, just inside a signature this time.

[rinichan]

but the problem is, some of the tutorial who has pic (easier to follow for me I guess) dont show the images. You see I had a little problem with language coz English is not really my main. If only I can be redirectetd to an easier tutorial with pics, I could go.

[felix]

Yeah a lot of tutorials have "expired" because images were hosted outside the forums and not on galleries here. I might just have to remake the entire thing to contain only the tutorials that still have images, but chances are those will inevitably expire as well...

Not really sure what's best course of action to be honest.

[The Drunk Demoman]

Someone should save all the tutorials and archive them just in case.

Here are all of my tutorials thus far since I'm not sure which ones I posted here before:

Monkey Signature Tutorial

Spoiler:

Basic Signature Tutorial

Spoiler:

Better outcome:

Daft Punk Signature Tutorial

Spoiler:

Mecha Signature Tutorial

Spoiler:

Animated SEGA Font Tutorial

Spoiler:

The Gradient you will need (Big image)

Spoiler:

The Tutorial

Spoiler:

Outcomes

[Reverzer0]

Originally Posted by rinichan

question is not mine qctually but we had the same question so i copied...

i have alternative ways on animating if you interested to learn from the scratch using photoscape,
http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php
this is free. i learned basic animation using this one before.

here's some samples i made when i was still apprentice in animating using photoscape,





edited: if you are interested, i'll try to instruct you in shortest way i can plus screen shots",

[Krytonis]

Hi I have several pop-up signatures. I saved them as a gif. Even if I saved it as a gif. Once I upload them to AnimeSuki forums they white transparency background is still there. It wasn't like that before... Help!

[Dist]

Don't save as gif. JPG and PNG support transparency too.. Can't offer more detailed instructions as I am not home but it should be easy enough to toggle when you use '' Save for web and devices '' on Photoshop.

Anyway, always save as JPG/PNG. GIF sucks for it's quality.

[felix]

Don't use the animesuki upload feature. It is also possible your entire signature is above 50,000 bytes (ie. 48~ kb) and is optimized by the forum.

Upload it to a imagehost and post it here.

[ranran]

My contribution...

Spoiler:

[tsu.jp]

I posted a guide on making anime GIFs, no optimization or anything. I guess I can contribute that.

It's a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEfkeI_jfQA

[Krytonis]

I would like the make a signature similar to this.

This is one of the signatures escimo made. Pardon me for posting this! I just really wanted to know.



Is there a specific tutorial on how to make those cybernetic lines and effects?

[JRendell]

Originally Posted by Koominator

Is there a specific tutorial on how to make those cybernetic lines and effects?

They're just brushes. Your best bet for them would be on deviantArt. Here's some I found after a quick search; Z-design Tech Brushes.