Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #3

Sorry I was meant to do this update earlier in the week. But then my stomach went a bit wobbly after eating a bad takeaway and I ended up being laid low for a day and a half. I'm feeling time-lost this week. Like I'm trying to play catch up.

So it's the end of the third week of work on the latest project, which is Random Dungeons and Dragons bullshittery (part 1). An attempt to take that old pre-vis from ages ago and turn it into a proper cartoon.

I think the best way I can quantify my progress is to visually show how many of the 9 characters I've successfully animated, as that's what the bulk of the time is being spent on.

 Therefore I'll present this visual slide each update:

So during week one I was able to send the 'puppet' of Idowa (played by ZF DigitalVagrant) to the artist I'm commissioning. And those files arrived back this week. I've slotted them into the animation and since the artist tried to keep the same proportions and scale as my photoshop layers, the process has been mostly seamless.

There was a bit where Idowa's nose didn't load and the mouth layer was backwards, which amused me greatly. But beyond that it was mostly seamless.

So Idowa is now almost fully animated. And since she's the only one with a functioning mouth she almost comes across as smugly mocking the rest of the party ahead of their transformation.  

Since talking takes up 90% of any given Dungeons and Dragons adventure, I've been very keen to focus on mouth movement especially. As a result I've decided to include not just the mouth changing shape, but also the chin moving. I'm offsetting the chins vertical movement by 1-2 pixels depending on how wide the mouth phoneme (shape) is for any given syllable.

It's subtle. But I'm finding it noticeably better looking. The mouth isn't just cycling between pre-sets like an early South Park episode. But the whole jaw is moving up and down. Coupled with blinking and eyebrow movement, it really makes conversations feel more alive. And since humans are near hard-wired to focus on faces, I feel that the details really matter.

By week two I was able to complete the bugbear puppet. That didn't take very long due to its simplicity. A bugbear is a large furry creature that we only encounter a couple of times in the adventure. And the talking bits were made easier due to the design including a large cow skull helmet that covered the mouth.

The other half of week 2 and week 3 has focused on the puppet of Eandor of Corlin (played by ZF Waffle and then ZF Digby the following week). That's proved tricky, simply because the character changes faces when Digby takes over. Meaning I've needed to duplicate almost everything (idle animations, blinking animations, etc)

Also, sometimes I need the puppet to either walk in a specific direction or look at someone. Necessitating the doodling of a side-facing version. And since only a front-facing version was considered in the initial design I had to draw it that puppet myself, rather than chop up the design.

Gaze upon (and mock) the hilarious failure that is my own drawing in contrast with the artist:

It's like that Potato Jesus thing from a few years back. The artist will correct this mistake.

Additionally, the background artist has almost entirely completed her work now. There were about 53 unique background plates that needed to be redone and she's working on the final six. I'm going to add in some shadows, maybe some dynamic lighting. But for the most part the background work is complete and I can focus entirely on the characters.

Lastly, insofar as outtakes are concerned, at random intervals it appears that the animated Idowa will get "mini me" appear at her knees. It it profoundly weird, since I can't for the life of me figure out how it's happening. When I open the After Effects composition there's nothing there. I'm starting to think that After Effects is just fucking with me.

The editing continues...