To go along with the new style for Happy Bear is the new Gary the Gopher...
(I used custom brushes for the hair)
I won't need to use the image warping technique for this character. He can be animated entirely in Anime Studio. I don't even plan to have his legs on separate layers. They will sort of just move around as part of the body shape... like marbles in a sack.
His rig is a piece of cake. Everything just works perfectly. I'm using a very basic rig with mostly point binding but I'm putting in "fan" bones with offset constraints to still get some smooth movement. The body does have flexible binding on some points for the fat flabby parts and I need that for squash and stretch. I plan to use a TON of squash and stretch in this project.
I am using a bit of complex masking. Took a bit to figure that part out. I need the forearms and biceps on separate layers but I also need the shading to continue through seamlessly and I also need to fade the shoulder into the body. Best if I show how I did this in a video tutorial. It's wicked complicated but works perfectly.
For the hair on his "elbows" I'm using a little trick I figured out a while back for a character that had offset round shapes at the elbows. When the forearm rotated around I had to "flip" the offset shape to the other side.
I am "flipping" the "hair" shape points which are not connected to the arm. This allows me to rotate the arm and keep the hair "pointing" in the right direction. Otherwise the hair would be on the inside of the elbow when it turns. So now as the elbow turns the hair pops around to the other side. This means my forearm shape is very simple and can rotate all the way around without any trouble.
I wish I had recorded some of the development of this but I will definitely do a video tutorial and show how it all works and how I created it.
Regarding the character design, I like the subtle area of his muzzle, the dimensional look you gave the part where his nose meets his face.
I suggest adding a little shadow underneath his mouth though, its reading a bit flat and would push the dimensionality like you did with the upper part of the muzzle.
Reading about your rig gives me a headache, but no doubt you can animate the hell out of him with it.
I'm curious, do all the "hair" shapes add up to long render times? I was just thinking that maybe the hair could be rendered as an image and the image put back in the bone rig, maybe it would decrease render times.
Thanks for the advice Blue! I agree. I noticed right away I need some darker shading under the muzzle. I think I will do that "on the face". Right now the face is "stuck on" the body. I plan to move it to a new layer and can drop in a shadow shape. I also want to darken the lower body area around the legs as that area should be darker as well.
The hair is just a custom brush on a simple stroke. There are not "shapes". It's a set of brushes I created a long time ago that I use for fur and hair. I have a set of 6 brushes, each in a different orientation. On each side the hair points in a different direction based on the direction of the vector so I need "flipped" brushes. So I have 2 "main" hair directions and 2 flipped of those. I also have two that are straight up and down and straight across. In this character I only used two of the brush versions.
There is no noticeable render time increase with or with out the brush on the stroke. It renders in seconds. Actually effects like soft edge and gradients add more render time than brushes do. Brushes are very very fast, however they do tend to be a bit "pixelated" on the edges. For this use it's perfectly fine but for other smoother type things it can be noticeable.
p.s. A huge bonus with this character... NO COMPLICATED PHONEMES FOR LIP SYNC!!! His teeth bobbing up and down and other cheek motion will indicate speech.
So the hairs are just lines with line-width? I just assumed they were all closed vector shapes. There I go making an A$$ of myself by A$$uming.
I wonder if rending out the hair and bringing back in as an image would resolve the aliasing? I only say this because AS seems to do some mild smoothing to images and this might message the aliasing issues out.
Here are the brush images I used, Yes, brush images are scaled just like any stroke with the stroke width. Image layers are antialiased nicely. I think brush images are not "smoothed" in the same way.
Whoa! Just had a thought about brushes and the "rough edges".
A brush is "transparent" based on the "white" of the image and not the transparency. So that might be why the edges are rough. AS is using an entirely different method of "masking" for brushes. The image INSIDE the brush is smooth, it's only the transparent EDGES that get rough.
A brush is "transparent" based on the "white" of the image and not the transparency
...now I'm lost again...
Your brushes are lines with manipulated line-width and somehow they are colored in a gradient from white to black and white again...
...and maybe they are masking another color vector shape for the color?
Do you have AS Pro? Check out the stroke style. Click the advanced box at the bottom of the style palette. There is a box for "brushes". This pops up a window with a bunch of small png or jpg images. You select those to apply as a brush to a stroke. The image is repeated on the stroke.
All I did was create those brush images above, put them in my brushes folder in the AS application folder. Then I created a stroke (very very thick) and selected the brush for the hair. You can save those brush images from this page right into your brushes folder (if you have pro).
Brushes use the "white" of the image as the transparency. Only the color that is NOT 100% white will show. It's done automatically. I have no alpha channels in the brush images. I don't use masking for the hair or anything like that. It's just a custom brush I loaded in. I adjust the width of the points to make the hair longer or shorter in certain spots.
I also used a "Shaded" effect on the strokes. This allows the color to blend into the body.
