MoTR Production Update: Week 16
- 1rregularcharlie
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Ahoy sailors! Been an active 2 weeks!
Welp, almost immediately after finishing the last production update all of Europe was hit by an INSANE heatwave. Somehow my vampiric bods managed to weather that and make it to this week, which is significantly cooler.
Now usually intense heat messes with me but strangely, despite how much sleeping was impossible, I managed to keep on chipping away. So let's get into it!
Also look at these lil' dividers I made! I should have made these aaaages ago.
Current Status:
General:
So last production blog update I was getting through some of the final bits of "rough" animation for shot 3 of short 3.
Happy to say that's completed and moving it into blender went pretty dang well. :D
I've also completed the model sheet of a new character; B.B.
Aaaaaand FINALLY gotten onto fleshing out the Animation Guide. Which is my focus in the coming week.
So let's get into the deets!
Rough Animation:
Animation:
So happy to say the "rough" animation for shot 3 of the 3rd short is dooooone. FINALLY. I'm also happy to say that the layering technique worked well when imported the rendered IMG SEQUENCES into Blender. :D
Check it out:
IT LOOKS GOOD RIGHT!? I love how it came out.
Now then let's get into the nitty gritty.
Lessons in Layering:
So, the shot above ONLY works because it's a still shot, as in the camera does not move. Were the camera to move at all the illusion would break almost immediately. Take a gander:
So I'm super glad to see the layering technique we've developed for this kind of animation works reasonably well. The downside is that constantly keeping in mind the necessity of separating the animation of every character based on how close or far away their parts are from the camera can be very time-consuming. Particularly when those parts are moving between the layers.
I ended up helping myself by defining the different layers by changing the colours of the outlines of every part of the character that existed on a different layer to the rest.
Nevertheless, this is a really involved process and VERY important to get right. Generally what this means is that extra weight is placed upon the rough animation portion of the pipeline. Rough animation is always an important part of the pipeline (as it informs all that comes later) but now needs extra emphasis with regard to making sure the layering is appropriate and will work in a 3D environment.
Which means I will need to really make sure I communicate the complexities and rules of layering in the MoTR Animation Guide.
"Rough" Animation:
So this part is more about me giving myself a mental note for the future. You can probably tell but the rough animation I've done thus far really isn't that "rough". In fact it's pretty freaking clean. Overly so. It's probably the biggest reason why they took so long. They're too clean.
Natka called me out on this and I agree. I wanted to make them as clean as possible honestly just to see if I could get it took look good given all the unusual techniques we're using. That accomplished, expect any further rough animation from me (Charlie) to ACTUALLY be rough.
Shading for Layering:
So a potential issue I spotted a few weeks back was with the layering technique being used by the 2D animation would break if we kept up with our older shading we were using.
See with the limbs generally be separate in the layering, like with Hawkins' legs being ahead of their torso in the 2nd shot, if we shaded the torso and legs as we had planned originally the layering would become obvious as the shading wouldn't line up with each other.
I had thought that perhaps we could compensate for that in the 2D Animation but ultimately getting it exact enough to work is a massive, avoidable headache.
So we reworked the model sheets to ease up on the shading and make layering easier.
As you can see the colours have essentially been flattered out. It looses some of that pop, but it'll allow us a lot more freedom in terms of the animation itself.
This is actually a frequent issue that comes up in rigged 2D Animation. Hence, why a lot of shows that use rigs tend to have characters that are flat, in terms of colour.
SPEAKING OF MODEL SHEETS!
Model sheets:
B.B.:
So, I mentioned it previous posts but as we rewrote aspects of episode 1 we created a whole new character!
I showed some of the initial concepts that Natka doodled, but I'm happy to say we've finalised the design!
Firstly, Natka did some more detailed concepts:
So there were aspects to this character we were sure on from the jump. For starters they're Lamenter's kid and thus should take on some visual similarities to her. We also always knew we wanted this character to have long arms they drag about. B.B. is specifically a Spirit teenage Apathy. They just want to nap, eat snacks and play video games.
We decided against the ghostly trail, and liked the idea of B.B. being a relatively small spirit.
So using these as a basis I went and made a B.B. model sheet.
There was a lot of discussion back and forth about some of the specifics. I didn't want ANOTHER character in a hoodie partly because it was repetitive and partly because I'm officially sick of animating the hoodie strings. So we decided to go with a hooded poncho. The fact that it's essentially a blanket and that being perfect for a character who just wants to nap is also a happy coincidence.
I decided to remove any indication of a neck to tie B.B. to Lamenter's floating head design.
The poncho itself was easy to colour as it's just the colour associated with The House of Apathy.
The trickiest part about animating B.B. will be in regard to colouring their black limbs and using white outlines to make sure parts don't get lost in the shadow.
The Animation Guide:
YES! I'm finally onto actually putting the animation guide together. I'm super happy I decided to delay doing so until I had really gotten into the weeds of rough animation, via animating a few of the shots as it will be informing a great of the guide itself.
This will be my primary focus in the coming weeks. Upon its completion we should then begin bringing in some rough animators to work on the series. Whilst they animate the shots for the shots I'll be focusing on redoing the script and storyboards for Episode 1. Which will then lead onto gathering the voice actors again, getting the new lines recorded, picking the take that works best, sending that off to Shannon to clean up as I rework the boards to get the general characterisation of the characters correct based on what is said.
The biggest issue I have with typing up these Design and Animation Guides is I always get a little lost on what to focus on and how to order things. Luckily I got Natka and Katherine to help inform those decisions.
3D Modelling:
Katherine's hard work on the ship goes on! It's a very complex model that we're intending to get as right as possible as its one we will be using over and over and over.
Hence why getting in all the small details is both import and time-consuming. TAKE A GANDER!
These are just some of the smaller details we're working on. And a lot of this are stand-ins to be better defined as we go over the model over and over. Katherine and I have been going over the finer details and with my new ability to somewhat navigate Blender, I can actually get into the weeds of her hard work. :D
The Coming Week:
1rregularCharlie:
The animation Guide will be my primary focus for the coming week. As well as adding some more nuisance design direction to the Design Guide.
Natka:
Natka is a busy bee and has some life stuff going on in the near future so will be focusing on that. Her advice is always valuable to keep me on track.
Katherine:
Katherine is also going through some stuff right now and thus is taking a bit of a step back from modelling the ship to focus on that. Potentially I may need to take over that aspect but we'll see how that goes.
With all that said...
I'LL BE SEEING YA IN THE SEAS BETWEEN SAILORS!
In like 2 weeks when I'll type out another update. ;D
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