MoTR Production Update: Week 18
- 1rregularcharlie
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Ahoy sailors! We've been active this past fortnight, despite the heatwave.
Just as the heatwave died down during the last update a surprise new one took its place. Almost like global warming is actually a super bad thing we should do everything we can to tackle.
Anyway progress has been made! Let's go over it.
Current Status:
General:
So I had intended to spend the last 2 weeks simply diving into the Animation/Design Guide until it was done. However, I realised that it's been about a year since I pulled the trigger on developing Member of The Revelry properly. It would probably be very appropriate (and mentally healthy) to take a moment to celebrate the progress made on a tiny budget with a tiny team (whom are mostly volunteering their time) because frankly it's insane.
So I wrote a very heartfelt thank you to the team and, with a small poking from Natka, I spent some time creating another heavily animated comic celebrating the progress. In a heatwave. Getting that done I immediately turned back to the guide and got to work in the hopes of getting it done. TLDR I didn't, but I made a lot of progress on it.
Whilst I was doing that Katherine has been doing some fantastic modelling work which I am very excited to show you lovely readers. It is so cool seeing a design of mine rendered in 3D. :D Anyway with all that said, let's get into the further details!
1 Year in production celebration:
Appreciating the Crew:
So for those following my YouTube or other socials you'll have probably already seen this. Nevertheless, it is from the heart towards the team and everyone who has supported this series up to this point.
FYI, I didn't dub myself Captain of the discord. The Voice Actors did even after I told them not to feed my ego. :P
The Year 1 Comic:
As I mentioned before Natka prompted me to maybe make something more to celebrate a year of development. I chose to interpret that as creating another animated comic go over more details of Member of The Revelry and got to work. She actually just intended to make more emotes for the discord but WHATEVER.
Anyway, the UK happened to be hit by another heatwave during the week I was working on this comic and I won't lie, it certainly did affect my speed and energy levels. Mostly had to make this late at night so it to be cool enough for me to concentrate.
With all that said, I powered through and got it dooooone. Take a gander. c:
Honestly trying to get all these animated gifs to work over all the socials that operate differently was a real pain. That said, glad it's done and out there! :D
BB's model sheet:
Before really diving into the Guide I took a bit of time to create and discuss the design of our latest character BB. Using Natka's concepts as a base we came up with this:
In the initial concepts we discussed having BB in a hoody. But I quickly came to realise that BB would be the 3rd character with a hoody, and I've come to loath animating the hoody strings (as lovely as they are when they're animated well). So we switched the hoody design for a hooded poncho.
Personally I like it because it adds some ties to BB's creator/mother: Lamenter. BB's head also floats much their mum's. :P
Animation + Design Guide:
Merging the guides:
So as I began working on the Animation Guide as a separate entity from the Design Guide I quickly realised that I kept needing to reference material from one guide in another. In the end it just became easier to merge both the guides together.
And I did that. Now the guide is quickly approaching 100 pages/slides long.
The Technical Aspects:
So as I mentioned a lot last update a significant portion of the Animation guide would need to be dedicated to explaining technical aspects of mixing the 2D Animation of the characters with the 3D environment.
To that end I actually created several pages dedicated to Layering which can be viewed right here:
I imagine when we start to bring in new eyes to the production I'll have to reword or clear up aspects of the guide and I'm suspecting most of that will go towards the pages/slides to explain technical aspects of the series.
General Animation:
So with the more technical aspects out of the way for the moment I decided to go over some of the general animation rules and stylistic notes we'll be using for this series. There's certainly more than I'm going to share here but here's some bits and pieces.
Pose to Pose:
Pose to Pose is the name for a type of animation that has the characters move from one pose to another instead of animating an entire sequence Frame by Frame.
To help demonstrate this I drew Hawkins being a cutie patootie.
Acting and Over Acting:
Most of my professional animation career has been as a 2D Character Animator, so Acting has always been a very important foundation for me. As such I dedicated 2 slides to demonstrating this process and the difference Hawkins acting should be in relation to the rest of The Revelry characters.
Here's the page for character acting:
Related to this I also decided to dedicate a page to Over Acting. These would be moment where the characters break their own models/designs to express themselves. Like in classic Looney Toons, Tom and Jerry cartoons.
An important note to this is that every character BUT Hawkins is capable of Over Acting.
Anyway I drew some examples and added them to the page:
As you can see from the page, one of my drawn examples of Over Acting is better than the rest. Namely, this one, which Natka immediately turned into one of our discord emotes:
Expression Blink Expression:
Related to both, Pose to Pose and Acting I dedicated a page to how I animate characters changing expression. Namely, if the timeline allows, I will have a character blink from one expression into another.
Character Specific notes:
So some characters have unique aspects to their design that should be noted because they'll cause them to be animated differently. I'll go over some of them now.
Reveller's Eye:
So Reveller only has a single eye, that switches from one side of her head to the other, whenever she wishes. It does this by literally shifting over the shadowed part of her face.
Potas' Mohawk Fin:
Potas' Mohawk Fin can be slicked back as the spines on his head can move backwards and forwards as if they are on a hinge. That said, Potas really doesn't like people doing that.
Cassettel's Fin:
You can see in Cassettel's design that she has a single fin that wraps around her whole body. This fin ripples all the time, but the speed changes based on if she's moving or float or feeling energised. I made an animated gif to demonstrate this:
3D Modelling:
The Grand Vagabond:
As I mentioned earlier, Katherine has been working hard on The Grand Vagabond, and I've really enjoyed working with her on voice calls through discord. The initial Grand Vagabond design has been altered and tweaked from the initial rough concepts I sent her with the realities of 3D modelling and have a clear idea of character proportions.
The Sails:
Myself and Katherine finally managed to get into the design of the Vagabond sails. We decided long ago the sails themselves aren't actually attached to the masts in any physical way we can see, they just kinda... float, next to the masts themselves. This becomes really obvious when they're furled.
Anyway, Katherine as always did some great work using the inbuilt Blender cloth physicals to help shape them. It was super cool to watch.
The Cannons:
So Katherine also went over the cannons. In the original designs I just drew them having a segmented centre that the cannon could be rotated within. The sphere the cannons themselves rest in can move considerably more, allowing for a complete 180 degree aiming.
Katherine created to examples of how she could go about the segmented design in the model. Either she can emulate the segments using the linework on the 3D model, or she could create a small indent in the model to make these segments. In line with what we've previous done with other segmented objects, such as a barrel, we decided to go with the method that actually has the segments in the 3D model itself. It does increase the polycount of the model, but that would be a serious concern if we were creating a video game.
The Greenhouse:
She also did some extra work on the greenhouse tower at the back of the ship. She resized it and added the bolts to the top and bottom of the tower. The greenhouse tower is actually home to a single large tree where the main staircase of the ship wraps around it. Narratively it's where The Revelry get their "fruit" and "veggies".
The Banisters and Metal bolts:
As you can see in the above images (and the ones below) you can see Katherine also redid the where the columns and rows of the ship connect. The reason for the redo was mostly my fault as I failed to mention to her that those parts of the design were meant to be metal plates bolted in place to keep the wooden pillars in place.
She also redid some of the banister work and we decided to add a soft circlular element to the design. Particually where the pillars and banisters end. I like it. Gives the ship a "toy box" feel. Makes it more child friendly. Which makes sense given over 50% of the crew are kids.
We also made a small adjustment to the Captain's balcony by having the spiral tentecles swirl around the banister rail instead of resting on top.
The Coming Weeks:
1rregularCharlie:
So my focus in the coming week is to finish the guide. I had thought I was almost done but Katherine rightfully pointed out to me that I hadn't covered any of the background design aspects. I'm a Character Animator at heart and I guess I've been a bit tunnel visioned on that aspect of the guide.
After that I can finally get to the rewrite and storyboarding. Which I'm really looking forward to.
Katherine:
As you can see Katherine has been doing fantastic work on The Grand Vagabond and I've really been enjoying joining her in voice calls going over the modelling process. I'm learning a lot too.
Natka:
Natka's doing her thing giving me great guidance as always and keeping me on track. It goes without saying but if not for her I would have careen WAY of course by now.
Here's hoping I didn't miss anything major this time around. Had to go back and edit the last production update I did because I honestly did Katherine a disservice. My bad. :s