Head (Patreon)

Weebl and Bob are finally back. If you're a long time watcher then you can probably tell there's been a few upgrades here. The main change is that they no longer use Flash at all.

Everything has been rebuilt in After Effects. It took a while but it was worth it as I can do so much more with them now. This is about to get nerdy. Please feel free to tune out now if you don't care about nerd facts.

First up whilst they are still vector based they have internal texturing, Nothing crazy but it is a little painted style texture to give them more solidity. This texture and their new eyes are all deformed by a bulge distortion so that as they turn they look rounder. The textures also follow the eyes so moving them moves the textures.

If you look carefully you may also notice the shading and some reflection from the ground. The ground reflections onto their bodies was probably the trickiest part of the rig. It's an expression that keeps the rotation level with the floor as the rock back and forth.

Biggest change is the head movement. By using separate audio tracks for each character I can get amplitude information to move the top sections of their heads up and down. Obviously in this episode we show it off a bit.

Shadows also texture themselves on the floor whilst following the rocking. It's swish.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy the episode and hope to make more in the future (just need to build all the other character now).