Animal characters with lots of custom brush work

[PaperWaspNest]

Hey everyone -

Earlier in 2015 I had some trouble getting the custom brushes for one of these characters working correctly, but some people here helped me through it. Thank you!
Here's where I'm at now: Two fully rigged characters, ready to go!


Here is a walk cycle for one of them.

*UPDATE!* And the other!


And here is a short video clip with some dialogue:
http://pwnart.tumblr.com/post/136480377 ... y-upcoming

I'm using Selgin's special mouth / head turn technique as explained here (using reference layers in AS11 instead of a script)
viewtopic.php?p=87542
Both character's snouts are essentially the "head" from the example there. It works wonders!

I don't have a lot to show of Rakitty, the smaller character, yet. Here is an older test I did before I upgraded the head to use that special technique:
http://pwnart.tumblr.com/post/131135900 ... ted_post=1

The big question I have is: Is it possible to have the "Frame-to-Frame Randomness" of the custom brushes animate at half the frame rate of the scene? I animate all of these scenes at 24FPS, but I tell it to export at half-frame rate (12FPS) because the wiggly textures are too fast and distracting at 24FPS. They look great at 12FPS, exactly what I want. I don't mind the bone movement being at 12FPS either since it essentially makes it "on 2's" and kind of hand-drawn looking, but certain movements would work better at 24FPS...

I have other questions but I'll put them in a "How Do I..?" forum post. I'd be happy to answer any questions or take any feedback you guys have!

[neeters_guy]

This is some exciting work in ASP. Looking forward to seeing more.

[slowtiger]

This is very interesting. Nice design and animation. Very good work.

But I have mixed feelings about the outcome. Of course it's just something to get used to, but for the moment I think the "cut-out-ness" of the outlines give away the construction. The fill textures are great and feel very natural, but the overall impression to me still says "cut-out".

In my own work I found that a living texture shouldn't get faster than on 2's (except where the animation calls for it) and often could be even slower. (And I need to be careful not to repeat textures or brush strokes in an a-b-a pattern, it needs to be a-b-c-a-b-c at least, but that's also good enough.)

There are several attributes to experiment with. The furryness of the big character looks too stiff for me. It should at least deform in movement, even better would be a change from 3 to 2 tips, anything which has a different stroke count. In FBF I'd draw these parts very loosely, no real inbetweens.

The upper border of the front leg shows a bit. In my own work with bitmaps in AS I use some kind of fuzzy border, not with airbrush, but with several parallel strokes. Like this: instead of the normal outline ----- I use some broad strokes //\\|||\\//. I wonder if this would fit your style.

Overall I'd experiment with more outline strokes. (I've seen some good use of that in a commercial project I've worked at.) I wonder if it's possible to have several strokes on the same outline and manipulate their visibility somehow in an easy or even automatic way?

These are just some off-the-hat thoughts before coffee. In general we also need to keep our head clear and not waste too much time on making vector look like bitmap hand-drawn FBF. Of course we could make it perfect - but would we have any time left for animation then?

[Greenlaw]

That's really cool! The slightly flickering brush fill has a nice organic quality to it. I think this effect is tricky to pull off without the animation looking like a chattering mess but you seem to have struck a nice balance here.

I agree, it would be nice if we had more control over the rate of change. For now, I think it's either just on or off though.

G.

[chucky]

Lookin good PaperwaspNest.
Here's a suggestion , if you want to reduce that cut out look.
Use animated vector noise in layer effects. Set the interval on 2 3 or 4 ?

[Poptoogi]

Dude....
All I can say is Awesome......awesome to the max!!! What makes this animation cool to me is that it is unique and stylized. I don't really care about the technical aspects of it, I just really enjoy if for what it is. It's beautiful! A lot of times you can tell when something it made in AS because of the tell-tale floating transitions. I intentionally try to avoid that by using a lot of starting and stopping motions (like Seth McFarlane's stuff) but you can still tell it's made in a program like AS. But when I look at your samples all I think is "oooo that's nice!" Which really, thats what all animation is trying to do right? I know you were asking about technical issues but I really just wanted to say it looks awesome as it is now! I can't wait to see more!!!! Thumbs up bro!

[exobunker]

very nice work with this painted look.

[jahnocli]

You could try moving the tail -- it looks very stiff. Good work!

[PaperWaspNest]

Lookin good PaperwaspNest.
Here's a suggestion , if you want to reduce that cut out look.
Use animated vector noise in layer effects. Set the interval on 2 3 or 4 ?

I was playing around with the Noise featrure in v11.2 and I thought it might help. Just a tiny bit though, you are right
I'll give it a shot! Thank you!

*EDIT* Oh wait you mean the noise feature under the vector tab. Yeah! I like including a small amount of that, but I might avoid it on small detailed areas like the face - since it makes the lines wiggle even during author time within the program, it can be confusing when I'm manipulating points by hand. Still, I think a little of this applied to the final animation could help.