Some Progress on "Dawn" Short

Some Progress on "Dawn" Short

Jul 26, 2022

Hi, all. If you've been to my youtube channel you may have seen a small teaser for an animated short I'm working on title "Dawn". In this post I just want to share a look at my progress on the shot I'm currently working on. Get ready for some run-on sentences, because I write how I talk, and I use commas where they make sense to me, not where my grade school teachers told me they go. I'm not sorry.

Here is the shot in Blender, shown in material preview mode. Animating the skeleton of a character has always been the most satisfying part of the process for me, I guess it's to do with being able to focus solely on the movement of the character, without having to worry about more detailed elements in their design.

While in previous projects I've done, I approached them by first animating the characters separate from the 3d scene, then adding the rendered png sequence in as a plane mesh, for this one I decided to animate the characters within the scene, which I think helps give it a more cohesive look.

Below is an example of exactly what was wrong with how I combined 2d characters with a 3d environment with previous projects.

Just look at how Tubeta's hand doesn't line up at all with the lamp it's supposedly resting against.

Disgusting.

This is because previously I had trouble getting the results I wanted out of Blender's greasepencil. This is because I'm a dumb baby who doesn't like learning how to use new tools even when they're objectively better than the tools I'm accustomed to. In this case it was pencil2d, an animation program I still find really useful for roughing out storyboards and basic little doodles as well as being much more intuitive, but overall inferior to greasepencil.

Getting back to my current project, one technique I found really useful (though in the future I'll probably realize is something only a dumb baby would do), is using a semi-transparent plan mesh as a kind of sheet of paper on which I can draw the frames in greasepencil using the draw on surface function. The reason for making the plane semi-transparent is that, while I still want to be able to see the "paper" I'm drawing on, when it moves within the scene as the final png sequence will, it covers the greasepencil, resulting in a "clipping" effect that prevents me from seeing the previous frame of animation.

Below is the same shot, but from a different angle and shown in solid mode to demonstrate the "clipping" effect.

Another added benefit to making the plane mesh translucent is it allows you to see what is behind the character, allowing me in this instance to make sure our creeping friend's hand lines up properly with the corner of the stone rubble he's placing it on.

Nice.

Anyways, I hope this was informative, or at the very least interesting. I will try to consistently put out updates such as this in the future, but I make no hard promises.

If you do like what you see and plan on visiting this page regularly, please feel free to tell me what you'd like to see from these posts.

And with that, goodbye for now.

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