Mahoraga Animation Test

So this is something novel - this week's episode of Jujutsu Kaisen featured a prominent role for "Eight Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga" (Sometimes alternately translated as "Makora"), one of my favourite designs currently at large. Seeing Mahoraga in full motion after all these years ignited an unexpected response in me - a real desire to animate him myself, or more generally to animate at all.

 I've never felt attracted to animation except in the abstract of wanting to see designs of mine in motion like this but without the impulse to grapple with the technical reality/process of execution that drives my obsession with painting - until now. 

I decided to sit down and simply render out a very simple motion, diving in heads first without any real information or guidance aside from what i've already gleaned through osmosis while working on Slave Zero X with the animation team. The results after about an hour of work total surprised me  - I was shocked that my construction, even in something extremely rough like this, felt solid enough to communicate the form - the image of the design remaining stable from frame to frame, imbuing it with a kinetic reality, is kind of overwhelming honestly. it's an extremely basic doodle functionally but i'm immediately struck by the potential here. Some part of me wants to individually render each of the 7 frames to something approaching the quality of my sketch paintings, just to see what that would even look like. Another part wants to immediately try something more ambitious.

 Either way, I have a long road ahead of me if I want to translate this initial foray into something more concrete, but I couldn't resist sharing this regardless. I can't speak to wanting to animate as a career path - I like where I am currently, but the idea of adding animation as a tool to my existing kit feels extremely exciting.