Senior Project - Week 8

Here is a current look at my drawing stacks. The left stack are in-progress animation frames, and the right stack are throwaways. It looks like the left stack is catching up since last time. 

My current estimation on the total number of character animation frames is 750, including held cels and animation on separate levels (for example, having the hair continuing to move once the animation has stopped). This number may be off, but it's in the ball park. Actual body animation will probably be 600-650 drawings, which oddly was my estimate at the beginning of the semester. Presently, I have 364 drawings made.

Animation Passes

I have heard differing opinions on whether or not to use separate passes for different body parts when animating. For this project, I'm experimenting using a large amount of separate passes, starting with the most important pass(es) and working from there. So my character is broken into up to seven separate passes per frame: the body/head, face, complete hands, legs, dress, two fins, and hair. Several of those passes are at least roughed in during the key animation phase; the hands are drawn as circles, the head is given its guide lines, and the legs might be drawn simply on some key poses. At this point the process seems to be working well for me and is allowing me to work on individual passes of different scenes as I am inspired to do so.

Once the scene is scanned, the process continues: the character will then need to be colored, the colors might need tweaking within After Effects, gradients and shadow maps will be added to show light, shine will be added to her eyes and hair, and some subtle blush will be placed on her cheeks and nose. 

An example containing a few of the mentioned animation passes. None of the passes in this image are final.

Senior Project - Color Script Update

I was told the next pass of the color script needs to be more indicative of the final outcome, so here is what I came up with. It might not be exact, but it's where the project's at right now.

Illustration 2

The next project for the illustration class was to create an image with a story. This story needed to combine three elements - a character from myth, a news headline, and a local setting. My mythical character was the kasa obake, which is basically a Japanese umbrella monster. The news headline was "Graveyard of Umbrellas at the Democratic National Convention" of which I just used the "graveyard of umbrellas" part. Finally, I set the piece at the Redmond Town Center, which is mostly an outdoor mall. One thing I found amusing about the mall is that there are umbrellas all around the area which people are free to use (and return when they're finished) while at the mall. So the three elements formed a natural fit in my mind. Here it is: