I finally finished my Sonic parody! It’s like 10 seconds long and yet it took me more than a year… Of course, accounting my daily job and all, but still a lot of time were spent on this one. With this parody I actually tried to do my best so do check it out here:
Okay, so what am I proud of:
Unlike my previous Spy vs Spy cartoon I made proper linework for Sonic model. Although, lines are not made in Synfig. What I did is, I rendered only regions with slight color offset to mimic Z Depth like so:
Then I created a Perl script that would process rendered png files through ImageMagick’s CannyEdge filter and create a separate set of images with lines (the color offset is needed for ImageMagick to see where one shape ends and other one starts). I combined those regions and lines in Pencil2D and then manually corrected them with my Wacom tablet which was much less suffering than working with lines in Synfig, believe it or not
Complex background with a lot of layers and parallax effect. I do think it looks very nice. Ah, it would have been even better to make the ribbon flutter like a flag in the wind but I don’t know how to implement it yet… Maybe with Dynamic converter, haven’t experimented with it
The special effects like waterfalls and water. Especially water. I made waves using dashed outlines with “Dash Items Offset” parameter animated. On top of it is Noise Distort layer that make those dashes look somewhat similar to ocean waves
Here’s a waterfall from the linked animation, done using the same technique:
Oh, and by the way, Happy New Year! I am a bit late on this and the animation doesn’t have to do anything with it, but I am in a good mood and hopefully you are too! If you have an animated project in the works I wish you to finish it this year!
Bravo and Happy New Year to you too
Good job (as always).
I’m missing the good old time of Sonic and other video games when they didn’t require a supercalculator and a bunch of GFX cards to run!
Yeah, I no longer play anything modern. I need to upgrade my PC it’s like 15 years old, I got one of those earliest Intel Core i5 from 2010. But upgrading PC is just such a hassle, buying all those parts, reading specs, reinstalling everything… And besides, original Unreal Tournament runs fine on my PC and I feel like it still satisfies all my gaming desires.
Don’t wait too much, the cost of RAM is becoming crazy because of IA trend.
Their are alreay in lack and they have “the good idea” to solder them on motherboard (of laptop at least), so you can’t even use it on another computer.
My laptop is not yet 3 years old and has already issues, my Core2 Duo of 2006 is still working and I use it as a rescue and for tests!
My advice: buy a middle-end config soon, no need super performances and lot of money, don’t expect it to work for 15 years again, before all the AI crap would be installed on motherboard …
And use Linux only!
Eh, if I am going to buy a new PC the goal wouldn’t be gaming (well maybe a little) but primary for animation purposes. So I would be looking for a CPU with the best single-thread performance (since Synfig can’t do multi-core or GPU rendering) everything else is not very important. Some low-end GPU and 16 GB of RAM wouldn’t cost that much I believe.
Yeah… I mean, I am wearing this “Developer” badge now so maybe it’s me who has to do something with that but, you know, coding is not my field and free time is scarce. Maybe one day, indeed…
Technically, we could do it with several instances of command line/renderer, but the input of ffmpeg would still be one frame only at a time (and they should be added in the proper order).
Or to divide the project in several chuncks, with multiple lossless output videos to be assembled and maybe compressed afterwards (or even with png’s).
