Hey, all!
As promised, here’s the latest couple of little things I’ve been tinkering with. First I made a skeleton, animated it, then drew a neat deer with some blurs and effects and fuzz and whatnot, and checked what would happen if I copy-pasted it.
It’s not a resounding success, but it did reveal a few important things:
-draw the neat figure first next time, and draw the skeleton around that. Animate that skeleton and import/animate as before. Reason to do it in that order is because otherwise the shapes jump around during importing, and you don’t want that. Also, if the skeleton is too simple, it’s easy to miss additional details that are needed, like the hooves having to bend in this one, or the tail.
-when drawing in Inkscape, don’t move an object by moving all the vertices. Synfig remembers the origin that object had in Inkscape, and the result will be a very strange sort of canvas when you select it. If this does happen, a simple duplicate and delete fixes the issue.
-fuzz is hard to draw by hand. Cheating is not. Clone the heck out of the strands using the Spray tool, make it and the smooth body a single path with ctrl +, then style with the Tweak tool. It didn’t come out looking perfect here, but it’s an easy way to make a complicated shape.
With regards to the art style, I wanted to move away from the usual MLP stuff and do something with thinner linework, but the influence still shows, I think. I also only did a profile mostly out of laziness, no real perspective or expression shifts. But, as before, it’s a proof of concept, at least. Makes the transition from storyboards to animation easier to do, perhaps? It’s getting there, at least.
I guess next thing to try is to make another character in the right order, as described above. I never actually did anything with my pony models, either, aside from cover art. Maybe a human next, or a dinosaur? Or just finish tweaking this thing? And, obviously, need to work on the actual animating and drawing in the meantime. Still, happy with it so far. Progress has been made ^^
StickDeerImport.sifz (137 KB)
StickDeerReady.sifz (9.25 KB)