Hey all! Hope you’re having a good summer so far.

Been working on things I can’t talk about yet, but spare time I’m still charging ahead with this animation stuff!

Since the first animation test was so environment heavy I’ve lately Been concentrating on character design. I took most of the characters in the book and redesigned them to be more animation friendly.

It’s been a fun exercise taking each character and trying to find things I could push further while refining the shapes and making them generally easier to draw.

Once I had the most of the cast redrawn I selected a few characters to do full turnarounds of.

This was super a super useful exercise in figuring out each character’s shapes in space as well as the general language of the line work a little better.

I did Bob first. I made a super primitive 3d model and rendered out a turn table of it, and used this as reference for how objects turned in space in relation to each other. It was super helpful and paved the way for additional attempts.

https://youtube.com/shorts/QulRg0Brr_w

https://youtube.com/shorts/ovHiyV-Cq1E

also made an expression page:

next up was the Pigeon Man. Given his outfit,  I went much heavier on the 3d. Had some pigeon models I particle scattered onto a rough block model VR sculpted in medium. This made it to where I only really had to draw his face and hands, which saved a ton of time, and provided a much more accurate result.

https://youtube.com/shorts/YF5rhIDSOgk

https://youtube.com/shorts/uSBdE8h5xAA

also with expression page:

Feel like these are beginning to provide a roadmap to how I’d animate more character heavy scenes.

Lastly I’ve been working on this montage poster but still have to fix a few things. It’s getting there.

Still not sure what the grand plan is for all this stuff yet.  Enjoying the process and learning a lot though.