I’ve completed my first ‘emotional’ test. It was a lot of fun, but I also discovered a lot of problems that need to be solved in my current template.
Check out those silly emotions: youtu.be/VACKaaHKzIY
Next, I’ll try to make the guy talk or, maybe, experiment a bit with more complex emotions, like sadness, crying. Not sure yet.
Nasty problems I found and have to think about it:
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The fur. It’s a plant layer with ‘alpha-over’ blend method. If I make some morphing/transforming animation, the plant layer removes needed parts of the layer under it. To put it simply, I need to correct fur layers almost on every keyframe I make. Noticeable at 20-21 seconds where it removes part of the left ear.
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Manual morphing. Some shapes (face) morphs automatically so proportions are always right whatever angle I use. But others are not (nose/mouth) because it’s too complex and I do morphing manually (and make mistakes). Noticeable at 6 seconds where I definitely screwed the form of a nose.
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Z Depth. It’s actually the Devil. Let’s say ears should be behind the face. But what if we look down? Then we’ve to bring ears above the face layer. How to make a smooth translating between those two steps? Noticeable at 11-12 seconds where you can see how ears are roughly changes its Z Depth values.
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Shadow/Light. It’s done completely using Synfig’s bevel/shade layers. It’s a very good stuff, but doesn’t always work. Pause at 26 second, you now see ears are illuminating from below. It happens because shade layer makes shadow where it shouldn’t (it’s not a bug or anything). I might make a different topic about this one.
Above points are just my grumbling, so I don’t forget about it next time 