Week 25: Drawing is Fun

While I've been still a bit down mentally the past week, I've been having a lot of fun working on my 2D shots! Having been working in 3D for so long (while fun), I haven't had too much of an opportunity to work doing 2D drawings, both for this drawing and in my spare time. However, drawing my 2D shots this past week has actually been a great stress reliever and has allowed me to reset my brain a bit from all of my 3D work (though I still did some 3D experimentation and technical art).

For the most part, this past week has been spent polishing and really rendering my 2D shots. I had the basic blockouts done for them for a while, but in order to achieve the more painterly style I want for them, I need to push the details and brushstrokes on them more. I wound up doing a bit of a shift from my normal rendering process, focusing more on color blocking and blending on a few layers rather than using many different layers and blend modes in Photoshop, which is my normal rendering process. It was actually quite fun experimenting with the coloring process this way as it forced me to rely a lot on specific hues and shades to make the details look smooth, while still maintaining a painterly look. I've also been playing around with different fur techniques and brushes for my wolf drawings, which look nice and stylized! I'm very pleased with the results, and while some shots still need a bit more polish, these are largely done, which I'm very excited about!

I've also been experimenting with animating procedural fire for my shaman fireside shot. While I'd love to hand animate the fire in 2D, especially to make the fire shapes and storytelling really pop, I, unfortunately, don't have enough time to spend a lot of time focusing on that fire animation, especially considering all the other VFX and 3D animated shots I have to focus on. I've found a decent way to make procedural fire effects in After Effects, which has made the process much easier. I've been playing around with animating and implementing my 'story fire' effects within the larger fire- it's key that they stand out to the viewer, but still feel natural and like part of the fire. Making drawing specifically to be distorted and altered in this way is also a bit of a challenge, but I think I've figured out a decent way to do it that looks pretty cool!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjKiwbPLGS0

I've also been working on resolving some technical issues in Cinema 4D before switching to polishing my layout shots. Unfortunately, there were some issues transferring my skinned rig into the place of my segmented rig for my wolf character, resulting in a rather horrifying scene:

It looks like this may be some difference between the two rigs causing it, so I'm unifying the two in a new file to hopefully resolve this so I can get started on my polish animations, hopefully in this upcoming week!