The goal of this document is to track my progress and development of my workflow. By doing this I can find ways to work faster and more efficiently. By sharing I can help others who are just starting or want to see a certain perspective. Written in mostly real-time during the project so expect to see changes in my thought process.
Process
For this project I really wanted to challange myself with something "cartoony" while also not making it too long. I had an idea of a chase scene in my head so to help solidify it I went looking for rigs that I could build a story around. My chase scene idea changed when I came across a Goblin and Faun rig by Thomas Vialetto.
Rigs
Faun: Model made by Victor REGIS Concept Art: Johannes Helgeson Rig: Thomas Vialetto
Goblin: Model: Victor-Emmanuel Pancrazi Concept Art: Youssef Zamani Rig: Thomas Vialetto
I'm not sure if there is any stretchy controls or duplication limbs in the rig, if there aren't - even more of a challenge! I decided the story would be the goblin has stole gold, jewels or whatever fauns like that have value (?) and uses his magic to escape while being pursued by the faun. For the environment I went to pinterest and went through a few images I liked, I wanted something small and contained so I can really focus on one character at a time. I came across this amazing small field by ZandraArt, https://zandraart.tumblr.com/post/146049129391/path and thought it would be a good start for my storyboard.
Boarding
I'm not the best draftsman but I still wanted to plan as much as I could for this shot and fast. I enjoy Krita so I began boarding there, I did all the major poses and a few breakdowns. Since I was drawing stickmen this allowed for me to really focus on appealing line of action poses. I did the whole shot on ones then re-timed the drawings because I knew my real life acting later on wouldn't be as much use in "cartoony" timing.
Scene Set Up
I set my bookmarker keys up for every second and half second frames for the first 100. I quickly modeled the environment using basic shapes and messed around with the rig I noticed that the . There are stretchy controls which is awesome but no bendy controllers unfortunately, either way I'm ready to begin Blocking Phase 1!
Ball Reference
I was going to start blocking the goblin rig but I was lacking some confidence before even starting, I needed to flesh out my timing more, my reference and boards weren't doing enough. I didn't feel like I could jump right in, and that's okay I just needed to start a bit more simple and test out some timing and spacing.
I liked the timing in this and it was strong enough for me to start blocking with the Goblin.
Blocking phase 1 : Goblin Body
I like this blocking pass but I noticed I could make a few of the silhouettes stronger for the key poses. I didn't really use the bookmarkers for this phase I was focused more on following my ball reference which I decided to tweak a bit.
For blocking phase 2 I want to go in and add breakdowns and mess with the hands and fingers. I won't worry about the cloth, tail, and ears until either phase 3 or spline.
Blocking Phase 2 : The Body
I'm pretty happy with how phase 2 of blocking came out. The timing a my ball reference helped a lot but I fear when I spline that a few parts are going to feel too fast so I'm preparing for that. I played with some stretching of the limbs and the props with the character but I'm a bit upset that their isn't anyway I can scale/stretch the feet. Their aren't any bendy controls on the character either so that was a bummer but like I said before, it's a challenge! I'm thinking of adding squishy geometry and duplicating some limbs for a couple parts when I hit either phase 3 or spline. I also didn't pose out the hands or fingers this phase it didn't feel right since the blocking still felt rough in the beginning. To recap, Phase 1 was to block out the storytelling poses. Phase 2 was to add timing, a bit of weight, and fluidity between the key poses. Now I'm moving on to Phase 3 which is where I'll prepare my character for a clean spline preview. For me, this means getting my pauses and shot rhythm right and adding in things like clean hand poses, tighter in-between and complimenting the smears.
Blocking/Spline Phase 3 : The Body
Welp, blocking for this phase didn't really go as planned, I wanted to add more inbetweens and breakdowns but the more I tweaked the harder I felt I was making it for spline. I couldn't really grasp the timing to be able to tweak anything without going into spline so instead of noodling on blocking I thought it'd be faster to just go into spline. When I splined the timing wasn't too bad but major things I missed, or could've focused more on, was settle and anticipation. I thought since cartoony animation was big on timing and poses that the anticipation and settle wasn't a big part of it. I was wrong. When I splined my animation felt zippy, while also being slow. It had decent poses, while also being lifeless. I cleaned up my spline for the first 100 frames and came to this result.
There's a few things I'm going to tweak when I polish spline but I think it's good enough to move on to the next 100 frames.
Frame 100-300 Goblin Body
Finished splining out the body and working on the timing. I had to readjust the camera so everything is in frame. I also changed the ending bit so that took some time as well but I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along. I also have been watching older cartoons and animations centered around the style im going for. Next is adding in cloth and facial animation which will all be splined. I think I'm going to save the tail for last as I'm not exactly sure how I want to animate it yet.
1-200 Frame Splined Body+ Cloth, + Facial
Pretty decent progress I think, it was pretty fun animating the overlapping action of the nose and the cloth. I think it removed a lot of the rigidity and made the goblin more fleshy. The last thing before I go back over the controllers in the graph editor is to tackle the tail *dread*. The tail is pretty skinny and long with a nice poof at the end. The tail reminds me a lot of a lion's tail or a elephant's in terms of shape and design. How it will function in zippy motions is something I will have to figure out. I'm going to do a bit more research but for now, here's most of the Goblins animation!
1-300 Frame Splined Body+ Cloth + Facial + Tail
*Groaning* The tail is done!I tried to make sure the that I didn't move it too much, only when it needed to.I also tried to make sure the tail supported the flow of the action or pose. Though it took awhile it was fun straight aheading the shapes for it. If I were to save some time in the future I would have blocked out the tail shapes beforehand because there were a couple points were I got stuck in terms of rotating too many controls. I also added some more facial animation (eyeslids, eyebrows). The next step is polishing the Goblin. I'll head into the graph editor and smooth out/ tighten whatever I can find on all the controllers before moving on to Faun.
Goblin Polish
Polish went well, I kept the graph editor open and made sure to smooth out the curves while also keeping the timing tight where it needed to be. I also made minor adjustments to the finger and hand placement. I've learned a lot so far that I cant wait to wrap up in the conclusion.
Faun
Since Faun's animation is pretty straight forward and short I thought it would be interesting to play around with a animation tool I don't use too often. In the past I had a floating character and I used animation layers and it was much easier to work with so I'm gonna use that with Faun. I'm not going to cycle the cloth and hair as I'll do that last, straight ahead like I did with the Goblin.
I put the timeline on 24frames and animated the cycle, then I looped the cycle infinitely and re-timed the arms and legs so everything didn't move at the same time. I did all of this on animation layer. Instead of blocking I'm just going to work straight ahead and begin with Fauns entrance.
Spline 1
I went back to the Base Animation layer to spline out the movement and I think the movement looks decent so far. I had to ask myself how do floaty characters move. I thought back to my work on floating robots and from watching superheros. I didn't want it to feel as though she had a jet pack so I reduced the hover a lot, I wanted the floating to feel magical, I think the second major pose could use some more work to really achieve that effect. I will be touching up the second pose then starting the cloth and hair on a different animation layer.
Spline 2
After reviewing my first spline pass I noticed Faun was looking decent but lacked more anticipation between her poses. I noticed she was going from pose to pose with very little momentum , especially in the first pose. I added more follow through in the legs for her second pose as well to help sell the floating. I also tweaked her blade(scythe?) animation. It look a bit lifeless and stiff so I had it correspond with her body angle and added a bit of drag. The hair was fun to mess with and wasn't as bad as the Goblin's tail. From this point I'm going to finish up Faun with polishing in the graph editor. Oh! and here's my layers I used for Faun.
*Base Animation is where I animated the main body controls during and in-between poses.
*Float I animated an idle float animation on major controls which help keep the character alive with minor movements that were set to cycle infinitely.
*Hair and Cloth are self explanatory, towards the end I accidentally did some hair animation (the strands of hair that lay on her shoulders) on the base layer but since all of the weights of the layers are the same this didn't cause any issues.
*Face layer is where I did all the facial animation.
I got lost a few times when working in layers, forgetting which layer I was working on sometimes. To help control this, if I wasn't working on a certain layer it was locked.
Polish
Polish went pretty smooth. I worked on the hair controls a bit more and tried to keep the movement flowing and but less distracting. I felt it was taking a lot of attention during certain parts. Now that both characters are done I could start with either FX ( the magic sprites faun shoots and the flower transformation) or I could work on the environment. I think I'm going to start on the environment first, it'll help guide how stylized I want the FX to be instead of vice versa. For the environment I want to compliment the characters hand painted style so ill start with some rough shaders and geometry.
Rough Environment and FX
Surprisingly the Microsoft Video Editor has some really great stock FX and animations. I played around with a few to get an Idea of how I want the FX to look.
The background is simple enough but I'm thinking of adding in some rocks. I'll have to paint the backgrounds a bit as I think the ramp shaders could use a bit more help. While thinking about further rendering I thought of Dungeon Defenders artwork. I'm not a painter by any means but I'll be trying my hand at something similar. Some cool work by Daniel Diaz and Jesus Diaz : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/o8yZO
Environment Final(ish)
Roughly the environment is finished there's a few things I want to fix with the leaves on the tree but that would be it. I added some rocks and some lights to brighten up the scene. I painted the textures for the grass and trees in Krita, the mushrooms and rocks are ramp shaders, for the road I found a cobblestone texture on texture.com. I'll fix up the leaves then handle the rest in post.
Final Shot
Composited in :Davinci Resolve 17 FX : Boris FX
Completion In : about 3 Weeks (procrastination included)
Conclusion
Well I started this project with the challenge of doing something cartoony and fun and at the very least I can say I had fun. When working on the Goblin I had to really work on timing and spacing and deepen my understanding of it. For my previous shot I used bookmarkers a lot and found them to be super useful but for this shot I barely used them so I guess it depends on what I'm doing. I got to play with multiples by duplicating the mesh, separating the limbs and stretching geometry which was a bit of work but a cool end result to see. I tried really hard at understanding when to move certain things and when to give certain actions priorities.
Faun was also a learning experience, I wanted her to have a contrasting movement to the Goblin so bother characters didn't feel the same and their would be some visual contrast added. I used cycles on her main animation which I found to be super useful at keeping the character alive between her pauses. Having a layer approach with her hair, clothing and body made it easy to manage as well.
For improvement and moving foreward I could've did a lot more planing for Faun. I didn't know the exact poses I wanted with her and I spent more time than I wanted to on her arm placement, line of action and hair. I could also improve on my final blocking passes before heading into spline. Faun didn't have a blocking phase because her animation was shorter and simple. However, Goblins key poses and inbetweens were fine but I could've done better with anticipation from one pose to the next and settling in the blocking phase. Though it's not perfect ( and I can't wait to receive feedback on it) I can say I'm happy with the end result enough to move on to the next challenge.