auction for pommyN64 at fA.

New things i tried with this animation;

-due to TVpaint crashing I lost all of the hand-drawn tail animation, so I figured that using AfterEffects' puppet tool would be a good replacement instead of spending the hours doing everything over again, and i think it worked great! SoooooOoooo... in my book, puppet tool is definitely good for simpler objects, especially if they contain fur patterns.

-I used the mesh warp tool in after effects for the specular of the hair, and the fur patterns, and it got me about 80% there. Some of the mesh warp is just... hard to control, or doesnt do what I want. I find that hand-tailoring it after the first pass is a good mix, as it's much quicker to start in after effects than to do it 100% by hand.

-I took a shot at cleaner line animation with tidy colors, and I think I did rather well. I still dont have the crispness you'd find in anime styles, but I'm making progress. This choice is a reflection towards some of the downsides that came with my more scribbly animation style.

-At this point in time, I'mma have to say that any extended animations will NOT be given the directional shadow hand painted effect, and instead will have alternative rendering methods like this, which are simpler and still pretty. in my past animations, it'd take about 2 days to paint 20 frames... and this is 200. You can see why that might be a problem both financially and timewise for me to try (at least until i find smarter methods.)

-I actually had to blend 3 transitions in this animation, which was pretty interesting; the loop has to blend from the end to the start, but it also has to exit loop in a smooth transition into the climax, and then the end of the climax has to smoothly loop back to the start, and that led to some more problem solving of sorts.

-spending the extra minute to close my linework so I can paintbucket the color in... is WAY more time efficient than being shitty with my linework and having to manually paint the shapes underneath.

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This animation ended up being about 215 frames, animated on 1's and 2's (with the brief pause) Took me about two weeks to complete, and I'm pretty happy with what I've learned thus far. One of the trends that I'm really starting to pick up on is that fA tends to have characters with a lot of markings and patterns, and it might seem obvious, but i never really paid much attention to it until I've had to animate it. I'm learning a lot of cool techniques, workarounds and whatnot for managing that sort of thing, and in the future, I'm going to see how well 3d-mesh alphas work for overlaying markings and if that will increase my coloring speed and accuracy.