Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #7

Good afternoon everyone.

So it's almost the end of the 7th week of re-work effort for Random Dungeons and Dragons bullshittery. And things are going nice and smoothly.

I'm currently in the process of animating character 7 of 9, having completed the bulk of 5 and 6. With those puppets either on their way to the artist or soon to be. By the end of this week I'm hoping to have 7 off to the artist. Leaving just 8 and 9 for next time.

A quick visual guide on progress:

So character number 5 was the dwarf Rarickt Rockbreaker. And number 6 was the various Goblin mobs we ended up fighting. And the bulk of the keyframing for both is mostly complete. Though their puppets are placeholders.

What will happen now is that the artist, TwistieZ, will draw over my crude puppets with colours and fine details. So that when I import the files back into After Effects they should immediately look hugely improved.

In fact, this far into the animation, the final style is starting to shine through. Minus some shadows and other polish. But you can hopefully see what I'm aiming for.

One notably missing element of the animation can be found in the combat scenes. It turns out that it's actually quite hard animating the moments when puppets hit one another. Making the force look convincing. Particularly when the assets aren't final, therefore you don't know where the contact points of the weapons are located.

As such, the fighting bits often have goblins falling over without really being touched. Like they're stage actors taking a dive.

I'm almost certainly going to leave all of the combat bits until the very end. When all of the puppets have their final assets and I can make it look convincing. It'll no doubt be part of the final quality assurance effort.

Additionally, the second problem that's been noticed concerns Nep's hair design. For I rather wanted to be able to move Nep's head. She laughs multiple times during the episode and a moving chin makes it much more convincing.

Alas, this meant that her long hair starting clipping into her back. In a way that is solvable by animation, but is quite a lot of extra effort. Under the circumstances a simpler solution is probably more elegant - tie her hair up.

I've temporarily gone with a cinnamon bun look. But I'm messaging Nep to find out what style she'd like to go for. It's her character after all. And the character sheet didn't specify the style, only the colour.

Lastly, I've been using the "puppeteer tool" in After Effects. This is a tool that can deform and bend static image in a way that mimics motion. Many of you might be familiar with it from the popular Youtube series If The Emperor had a text to speech device, where it's responsible for much of that distinctive animation style.

Here though, I wanted to be a bit more subtle with it. Eventually making the final characters appear to breath, fidget on the spot...

...and of course...have things jiggle:

The animation work continues.