Hang in there...

[Rodney]

The holidays can be rough on folks so...

 

Hang in there.

 

 

 

 

(This is a frame from an animated doodle I recently did named 'Sintercuss'... with the idea being to get an idea moving and take it to it's logical conclusion in one or two sittings. The areas tested included the use of limited (minimal) animation, sound, volumetric effects, text, etc. A few lessons learned include making sure there is enough contrast in the character to read well in a variety of lighting conditions and to plan on the doodle lasting more than 10 seconds because, while certainly not impossible, it's hard to tell a story in less then 10 seconds.)

 

[Rodney]

Tried something a little different (remodeled character basically from scratch and threw in a basic rig)... then thought I'd try toon rendering... then thought I'd go for a watercolor look...

 

 

[itsjustme]

Nice, Rodney!

[agep]

Nice. I really like the style and especially the colors on the last one

[Rodney]

Thanks guys!

 

I really like the style and especially the colors on the last one

 

I've tried to paint watercolor before (the real stuff... not the cg flavor) and it can be really hard to get a solid color spread across an area so I'm pretty pleased with the look of this one.

I have my doubts the effect will hold up with animation but I'd be glad to be surprised in that.

I suppose there is one way to find out!

 

Aside: When I considering the pine bristles on the branches I immediately thought A:M's particle hair would work well,and after placing the hair material on the branches and letting A:M render... it looked exactly how I imagined it would which... as I am very much a tweak as you go until something starts to look better kind of guy... is a sensation I hope to feel again. The toon render... that I had to tweak considerably as the early tests didn't have the line quality I was looking for. I eventually settled for a very thin line with 88% of underlying color and that worked a whole lot better. I did struggle a bit with lighting and color as each time I started to hone in on what I was after I noticed one element that still wasn't working... tweaked myself right out of those other desirable settings. In the end I did composite two rendered images together in Black Magic Fusion in order to bring some of what I considered the ideal color (specifically red) back into the image. I think I could accomplish the same composite in A:M but it'd take awhile longer to get there. And needless to say the text I'm adding to images these days is comp'd in via Fusion in a few seconds as well. As A:M doesn't have directly editable text capability Fusion has found a perfect fit in my workflow with A:M.