Three Beards- Finished & Available to Play Now

[Luke Marcatili]

Hi all,

Here's a shot I've been working on for a short animated intro to a point-and-click adventure game project I've been working on (link to our devlog in my sig).

Artwork in Photoshop, car animated in After Effects & dust animated in Moho 12. Please excuse the dithering in the gif- I exported it straight out of Moho in 256 colours, high quality but it's quite dither-y (is that a word? no it's not).

This is my first frame-by-frame attempt in Moho, and I think the 2nd time i've ever animated dust/smoke etc. I'd appreciate feedback on whether or not it's working, if it needs anything more, etc

[synthsin75]

That's dust is brilliant, especially how it comes into the sunlight. The whole thing is great.

[strider2000]

I like it

[lwaxana]

This is really lovely! The dust animation is beautiful, especially as it catches the light.

The only note I have is that the shadows of the car and bushes don't feel right to me. The shadow angle shouldn't be dramatically different based on where things are in the composition because they're actually incredibly close to each other compared with their distance to the sun. The shadows should be basically parallel.

But you could still do cool things with the shadow, you could have light shining under the car with the shadows from the tires and the body as distinct shapes.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sunset+ ... NAOfarM%3A

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=ht ... mrc&uact=8

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=ht ... mrc&uact=8

You could also try making the shadow a transparent shape so that the style looks more like other shadows in the scene.

I'm looking forward to see more on your game. Looks like it's going to be really cool!

[Luke Marcatili]

Thanks synthsin75 & strider2000!

Thank you Iwaxana for the suggestions. You're right about the shadow, I don't think it looks quite right either for a few reasons- I wondered if others would notice or not. It doesn't quite match the motion of the car, it doesn't blend properly with the other shadow areas or the ground underneath and it doesn't really look like it's being cast by the car since it doesn't have the shape of the tail fins and stuff like that as you pointed out with the wheels etc.

I had some trouble working out how to best animate the shadow actually. I tried to make it transparent but it doesn't look right alongside the painted shadows which are opaque.

Also, with my background painting the shadows on the ground aren't the same colour or tone as each other which makes it difficult to match the shadow of the car as it connects both areas of shadow (if that makes sense). I might have to go back and re-paint things a little bit in the background I think!

[lwaxana]

Hmm.. that is quite tricky. I think if you hadn't already painted the background, a good approach would be to paint the background without the bush and car shadows and then add the shadows as transparent shapes in Moho/Anime Studio so that they would blend seamlessly. If you wanted details in the shadow, you could even paint a transparent layer in photoshop and then animate a mask on that layer in Moho.

But a solution with minimal rework would be to keep a consistent angle on the car shadow. That way the eye won't be drawn to the shadow by excessive movement in an area with high tonal contrast. That would put the focus back on your beautiful dust animation!

[Luke Marcatili]

Thanks again Iwaxana- I've applied those shadow ideas to the new shot I've been working on. I'll get back to the shot above shortly.

In the meantime I wanted to share something else I've been working on. I needed to solve the problem of how to get the car, a fully 2D layer painted in Photoshop to turn as it travelled down a curved road.

I started off planning out key frames thinking I might have to draw it frame-by-frame (with path animation for the forward motion) but then I came up with this!



The car is basically a box made up of about 6 layers, each rigged with Smart Warp Meshes. The Meshes are controlled by 4 Pin Bones to control the rotation. I only needed the car to rotate to the left a bit, but I could get quite a bit of rotation up and down as well with this rig. I also tried setting it all up within a Smart Bone so the rotation could be controlled smoothly with a dial, but I couldn't get it to work and didn't really need it for this shot.

Here it is in action!

[lwaxana]

That's an amazing rig. And I really love your environment paintings. So gorgeous!

[synthsin75]

The car is basically a box made up of about 6 layers, each rigged with Smart Warp Meshes. The Meshes are controlled by 4 Pin Bones to control the rotation. I only needed the car to rotate to the left a bit, but I could get quite a bit of rotation up and down as well with this rig.

I'd be interested in seeing a demo or screen shot of that rig and smart mesh.

[Luke Marcatili]

Thanks Iwaxana!

Synthsin- I might be able to do a screenrecord sometime in the next few days and go over the rig. I've never done one before though so we'll see how I go. I'm sure other people could take what I've done and improve on it.

Was thinking about other uses for this rigging method on my way home today- with a bit of work I think I could use the same method to animate a 2.5D cityscape/parallax effect. I'll try it and see what I come up with.

[chucky]

Looks brilliant!
Hey what you've done with the car could really add to the scene where it skids to a halt. Even the most subtle of rotation will just illuminate any flatness.
Combine that with the shadow masking the light that hits the car as it alights and that scene will be really amazing.
The dust looks great btw.

[Luke Marcatili]

Thanks chucky! That's a great idea about using the rig in the 'dust' shot as well, I hadn't thought of that. My only concern is that it may mean going back through and editing the frame-by-frame positions of some of the dust to line up with the car more. But maybe if the car enters the shot at a different angle it can rotate a bit into the final angle just as it is hitting the dirt. I'll give it a go!

In the meantime, as requested, here's a talk through of the rig.



Timecodes:
0:20 intro and original artwork
1:00 Demo of rig
1:55 Moho Layers
2:42 Meshes
4:22 Rigging

Also I neglected to show how the roof was rigged, so here's a screenshot:

[synthsin75]

Thanks Luke. Great tip about running the mesh lengthwise. Smart break down of the car too.

[chucky]

But maybe if the car enters the shot at a different angle it can rotate a bit into the final angle just as it is hitting the dirt. I'll give it a go!

Yeah that would be cool!

[Luke Marcatili]

Hi all,

Work continues on my 3 Beards animated intro sequence, in fact it's basically finished. I just need the proper audio to do my final cut.

In the meantime I thought I'd share with you this shot featuring my approach to lip sync. It took me quite a while to work out an approach that I liked- I wanted a rig that was fast to work with, accurate to the proper range of mouth phonemes and also which allowed smooth tweening between mouth shapes. I've seen quite a few mouth rigs on YouTube but I didn't want just switch layers, nor did I want something that'd require me to create the right mouth shape with bone dials every time a new shape was needed.

There will obviously be a proper background in the final shot too

So anyway here it is, I grabbed the audio from Fight Club and for some reason it's really low.