Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #6

Good afternoon everyone.

I hope you're all having a smooth week thus far. And if you're in Europe at the moment I hope you've stayed safe through all the stormy weather. Quite a number of trees were bought down where I live.

So, last week, having completed the last Random Antistasi Bullshittery, I decided to sneak away to work on one of my big side projects - the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.

For those not familiar, this is a much bigger bullshittery project I have been gradually working through, based on some games of D&D we played as a group a few years ago. It's about 25 minutes long and has been going on and off the back-burner.

There's a pre-visualisation animation here for those curious. Showing what I'm hoping to create, though in a very crude form.

Here's a quick visual guide on progress:

So this is week 6. And I've been doing the following:

• Animating the puppet of Rarickt Rockbreaker, the bellicose Dwarven adventurer. And I'm preparing to send that puppet to the artist for him to draw the final assets over the puppets frame.
• Animating the puppet for the Goblin characters. The numerous mobs we ended up fighting throughout the adventure. This isn't quite ready to send to the artist. Still very much in progress.
• Making any small corrections to the Idowa, Digby and Carton final assets where appropriate. For things like missing noses, overlapped textures, etc. Sometimes the final assets don't mesh 100% with my planned animations.

I'm finding that the prior experience is speeding up the process. I found Rarickt much easier to animate due to lessons learnt.

For example, I'm now making separate and isolated compositions for things like mouth and eye movement. Like this:

These can then be overlapped onto the faces in such a way that lets me freely move their arms and heads without having to worry about affecting their facial features. They'll keep talking regardless of whether the characters are running, jumping or spinning in circles.

Whilst I'm reluctant to show too many side-by-side comparisons, since so much is still unfinished, I do have a few. Note that this is all very work in progress. Lacking shadows, background enhancements, etc.

So the plan thus far.

I'm going to continue animating the Goblins at least. Build up some work to hand over to the commissioned artist. Perhaps also including the next character Nep. Before turning to the regular bullshitteries.

It would also be really nice if I can get to the point that only Lump & Lashonda (mine and Cyanide's) characters remain. I'm leaving both till last because they're going to be by far the most complicated to animate. With the lion's share of the spoken jokes and action scenes.

But I think I'm making some great progress so far. And it's a welcome break from the usual editing.

Thoughts or comments? Feel free to chip in below. Many thanks.