Animation: New ideas for my Nauti 2D character

 

I know a little more about designing a cartoon character and decided to redesign Nauti the character I experiments with 2D and hand drawn animation with a while back. This new character sheet could be helpful if I decide to use the more mainstream style of 2D using bones, puppet tools and computer assistant like MOHO which looks pretty enticing but I will need to somehow find about 500$ CAD or more. If I could get up to speed in Blender I could mix 2 and 3D as I have been doing here and there more efficiently and at no extra cost. Right now I am playing around with the idea of making the keyframes in Affinity Designer and hand drawing the inbetweens and see how that works. 

I was hoping Procreate Dreams would be further along in features to do this but I might need to stay with Toon Squid on the iPad. Krita has improved but not enough for what I need so far. Open Toons is s till a little frustrating to work with but might have the features I need. 

Below is the original design, it's very different in style. 

dessin/drawing: acrobat en repose

This was all done on the iPad, the first try to do a colour drawing all on the device. It was not all done in one app, however. I started in Procreate but had to move over to Affinity Photo to do the doing and burning of the greyscale sections before colourizing them for the final look. Procreate can't do that. There was a lag with the Apple pencil as I went along, some of that was an Affinity update in the middle of the drawing process and seems to have worked itself out after a day. It gave me a good excuse to get into the very different interface on the iPad version of Photo and I have much better grasp of it now. 

This was maybe not the most exciting of my acrobat drawings but  beggars can't be choosers and there were no free shows for me to get new references from this year. 

New 3D Character - dog

This dog I have been working on for a quite a while and finally got it to the stage it can be animated. It is loosely based on my dog Watson, so I might use that as it's name in a project. Rigging it was the big problem. the tongue was a nightmare to figure out, and the character object for quadrupeds in C4D is pretty wonky compared to the biped. As of today he also has a collar but I didn't feel like re-rendering the images to show it. Laziness I guess.

New Character - Weasel (belette)

So I did this fairly quickly once I started working on in C4D after a couple months of knocking it around in my head. I have no idea what sort of character he is yet, like the fox Renarldo I made a while back I'd like to incorporate the french word belette (weasel) into his name as renard is fox in french. I have ideas how he will move around etc... just no idea sort of project he will be running around in.

I gave him fur like Charles Billingsworth the 3rd, the platypus in my Dramatic Reading series using the same sort of set up for that so it renders fast and helps give him some depth, I think. Not sure if he should have some sort of clothing or accessories yet. After I decide on that I can start rigging him for animation.

UPDATE:

I worked more on his fur and gave him some black hair on his tail, plus made his eyes smaller and the pupils larger. I actually made a new set of eyes that work completely differently to get more expression in them. I am also almost done with his face and eye expressions. Over the next few days I should have his rigging done and maybe do a little animation test. 

New Crow and cast of characters

click to enlarge

So this was another character I did some tests with then nothing but think he could be useful. Like Renarldo, I changed his rigging, changed him from 4 to 5 fingers and reworks his head a little plus gave him more expression.  He is a homage (rip off?) of a few designs done by Mike Luce in my 3D style for animations. I wanted him to be long and skinny to add a little variety to my stable of characters.

Click to enlarge

Speaking of my stable of characters - I've been putting them in the header here and on my home/portfolio page. Maybe someone out there will find them interesting enough to get me some much needed work! 

Renarldo - new version

click to enlarge

I made a little test film of this guy doing the Flashdance scene where the water drops on her head a few years back. I had lots of issues with the final rigging and as I animated, the rig got more and more out of whack.

In this version, he has the same head slightly modified and feet, but long pants, better shirt and arms with 5 fingered hands. I used the rig I have been using for Charles Webster Billingsworth the 3rd in the Dramatic Reading series so it's stable and flexible. This new version has a lot more controls and many more face morphs so he should be more expressive. His cheek fur uses the jiggle deformer for extra motion and his tail has a dynamic joint chain for the same reason.I used the Nitro4D eye plugins to make the eyes. The older ones were nice, I liked them but they didn't work as well and gave him a meaner look than I wanted.

Not sure what to do with him now, I want to do more varied cartoon work like the Dramatic Reading series but I'm sort of out of ideas right now on exactly what I want to accomplish.

Dramatic Readings: Swim! Eddie, Swim!

This time famous actor at large, Charles Webster Billingsworth the third takes on a dramatic scene from the film classic, Jaws 2.
Voice work once again by Mike Luce.

Kiwi in the Kitchen

I am as far as I can go with my next animation project until I have the voice work done, so I decided to make a simple character, something I've been thinking about a long time, for practice and to prepare and to keep in good form for the coming projects.

So this is a breakdown of the model, wireframe, textured and finally hair added. It's a kiwi bird if you didn't know already. I looked at lots of photos, skeletons, cartoon drawings and other animations to get inspired... but oddly I totally forgot what got me interested in the kiwi to begin with... this short animation which I think s brilliant!

I saw it years ago and honestly if I had remembered it, my version would have come out very different. Still I'm happy enough with mine for now.

I used the Character object in C4D for the rigging, they have bird template That was pretty simple to use as it's just a body with a hard and legs... no wings or arms or hands or anything complicated.

When done I made a little walk sequence.

Then took it little further and decided he should take a stroll in my kitchen.