Mai Shiranui sketch 2

I have a taste for drawing figures again, so here's a another pose without reference:

Rough sketch, linework and flats:

Mai Shiranui sketches

Had an hour to kill, so did a few gestures without reference, I really should do that a bit more regular..still a lot of kinks in posing and anatomy. I also should simplify a lot more, but I'm a sucker for drawing muscles.

These are the initial lines:

SMOKE Animation - Design

Alright folks,

Did some figure sketching this evening and started my next FX challenge, this time going to do some smoke. Here are a few designs for the smoke trail, I will do the animation and FX treatment in ToonBoom for study purposes.

I'm also doing a challenge with fellow animators Katerina & Des, first one is to animate a 4-legged walkcycle. I picked a cat, so expect to see some of that here soon. If anybody wants to join in, let me know.

She-Hulk Finished

A few lessons learned with this little project:

1) You can't be lazy with clean up. All the shapes need to stay consistent in size and volume and need to respect their own arcs. So for clean up I think it's best to also clean up keys, then breakdown and then inbetweens.
2) Pencil tool for clean up is really great for super quick coloring. For my next animation I'll use the brush with some texture and see if there are any benefits to using it over the pencil tool.

I would've liked to spend some time doing a background and doing a proper shading job, but just wrapped this up pretty simple using a copy of the color fills to generate an automated highlight.

You can also see a video that goes through the entire process from start to finish on youtube, hope this is useful to somebody out there! :)

She-Hulk Part 4: Clean Lines & Color Flats

So this 1 day exercise ended up taking far too long (nearly a week now), but it was great to test out a workflow in ToonBoom for handdrawn animation.

1) Clean Up: Hard Lesson Learned
It kind of fell apart at the clean up process though. For clean up (to save time) I cleaned up straight ahead from frame 1 to 16 only referencing the previous drawing, that was ok for the main body since I had clean, on model shapes to work from. My secondary action however (the jacket, hair, etc..) was very rough and only suggestive of the movement. I think I could've either cleaned up those shapes first, or I should've done my clean up by doing the keys first, breakdowns and finally inbetweens.

If you look at the animation you'll see there are problems with the hair, jacket, sleeve and her chest...biggest problem being the distance between the jacket sleeve and her hand, so I might fix that up at some stage.

 So I'm kind of thinking that clean up should be a trace of the animation, and not really a stage of the process where you can still tidy up animation.  I could go and fix this stuff, but I'm kind of tired of looking at this and I'll just take what I learned and apply it to my next animation....an easier design would definitely help!


linework:

She_Hulk Walcycle Part 3.5 : Clean Up

I originally thought I'd have this walkcycle finished in 1 day...I was wrong...very wrong. Inbetweening and clean up take much longer than I expected, below is a work-in-progress with 50% of the clean up done, I'm not sure if I should've have cleaned up keys first, then breakdowns, and on to inbetweens, I instead am going through it frame by frame. I'll try to do the rest of the clean-up tomorrow evening. (I also should've traced off the key I drew up in Photoshop, I think the face especially had a bit more appeal, but too late to change now).

She_Hulk Walkcycle Part 3 : Ready for Clean Up

My goodness, I think I had forgotten how hard frame by frame animation is :P All the more reason to get serious about this if I ever want to animate the things I love. Anyway, lot's of things to be corrected, but I'll try and do that at the clean up stage...in the end it's for practice, I'm not building a reel so it doesn't need to be perfect, as long as I see what's wrong with it.

If any experienced animators happen to look at my blog and have some advice about my workflow or general things I need to look out for or work on, please let me know!



COLOR:
Here's a clean up test in toonboom with a highlight effect. I used the standard pencil, but it was a bit too thick with a min. brush size of 20%, I'm setting it to 0% with smoothness knocked back from 20 to 5...it actually makes a huge difference.