A few more animation tests

Alright, so here’s the next amazing test from the animation lab!

This is a test of the idea of combining frame by frame animation with puppet animation. It’s incredibly rough of course.

First gif I created some guides in After Effects. They are IK chains linked to the head, making each ‘strand’ of green blocks very easy to pose, then I added the same bounce I talked about in the last post to get a rough simulation of the hair responding to the movement of the character.

I exported that as frames, took it in to Photoshop and drew his beautiful blonde hair over the top of each frame, using the green blocks as position reference. The result is promising, despite being pretty crude. I have never really used the animation tools in Photoshop so I need to spend a bit more time with that to get more familiar with it.

The actual gif there was created in Photoshop just to show you guys the results. I need to work out how to get the hair frames back into After Effects in a method that won’t be laborious, but I’m pretty sure there’ll be a way to do that without too many problems.

One thing about this FxF animation- once we do it, we can’t tweak that animation at all, unless we wanna keep going back and redrawing individual frames (which we don’t!) so in terms of work pipeline, I’d say we animate the character fully without the FxF bits, then do those as the last touches on an animation. Again, we probably don’t want to do this on every character because it’s quite laborious.