Poppy

 

Attempting to design some simplistic toons for more animating. So here's a new adventurer demihuman girl. No idea what's up with her yet. We shall see as her escapades unfold!

(first version)

(slight FPS edit)

And here's a little animation of her! Putting up two versions, as I can't decide which speed works best for the final moment of the clip. Meant to do something longer, but I got distracted by other things. Definitely need a lot of work on model consistency, but some of that is me rushin' to get some proof of concept done today. Not sold on her color pallet yet, or general design, but maybe I can tweak it more.

I find myself already hitting hard technical limitations on Fresco; pathing is way less useful than I thought it might be for little background elements, and moreover, there's a hard FPS cap; I wanted to have the clouds slowly and consistently move across the sky, but they kept going too fast and I couldn't line up the loop consistently. Looping the ground was also a tremendous pain to line up properly and still couldn't help but get glitched.

Fresco and Procreate are good for cute little looping gifs, but I think I'm going to have to upgrade to Krita or Blender sooner rather than later. Assuming my interest actually stick around longer than another week.

Skull Slash

 

Animation is a medium I've only had the barest and briefest of interests in before, but suddenly, I've found myself wanting to play around with it lately. This was made using Adobe Fresco. Initially, I was starting to use Procreate, but Fresco has some more features that make for a better workflow in creating simple animations (such as a easier UI layout for animating on different layers). While I don't think it would be good for full-throated animation production, simple little bits like this its pretty solid for. Still has some irritating flubs to it, but I'm also only toe-dipping here.

Fresco is a fully loaded illustration program that I believe is basically just all the illustration features of Photoshop forked off into its own program. Astonishingly for Adobe, it's also (almost) entirely free. You can pay a subscription for a couple extra brushes and materials and bigger cloud storage, but I can easily do without those. Even the animation system is, as far as I can tell, fully featured without needing to pay for it. Considering this is Adobe, I'm sure at some point they'll start pay walling it, but so far, so good!

I don't know that I'll go hard into this medium outside of some simple tinkering. Something as crude as this test sample doesn't take too long to make, but any serious animation effort would take monstrously more time and effort, not to mention kill the shit out of my arm, versus even just doing a comic. Still, in lieu of actually coming up with comics to make, its good to try out new things.

By the way, just who is this mighty skull character? We saw in before in my squiggle-vision post. Given how you want to keep things simple for animation, especially starting out, maybe this goofy guy will be a nice animation mascot to try things out with.

Squigglevision Tests

 

Made with Procreate. Never really had an interest in doing animation or video generally, but I kept seeing this "squigglevision" (aka boiling lines) style of character art around, and felt like trying it. You just redraw the same figure a couple times, tracing back over the first image, but making sure the lines are slightly off, and set an animation loop. I think there's a technique to doing it just right, and varying the line wiggle in specific spots to get the ideal boiling effect, but these are just some sloppy first attempts. It's kinda fun, does give a little more life to a sketch, but it's a effect best use for very simple cartoony models.

Several art programs have animation tools built in, but I just never tried them before. Doesn't seem so hard to use for at least short clips, but I imagine a full animation attempt must be a total nightmare. Even this quick slap up really emphasizes how much more work goes into a couple frames, and I'm not even trying to simulate motion or separate elements yet! Imagine trying to do squigglevision while also having synchronized lip movements for speech? No wonder you need teams of people doing this stuff!