TH17.5 short progress #7 (Patreon)

Nearly two weeks since I made an update on the 17.5 short. That's because the holidays came and shifted priorities. Not that I'm doing anything different than any other time of the year, but I did wanted to take a break during the Thanksgiving week. And there's the Christmas special which will take me a whole month to make because it is going to be my longest video yet. Because of that, the priority for the 17.5 short has been lowered in favor of getting the Christmas special out on time. Yet I still find to at least work on it for a few hours, even if it's just one hour a day. But at least, I have made some progress since the test footage. It's not much but I am beginning the second phase of the sketches to finally finish this part of the step and move on to cleanup.

And we begin the second phase with figuring out how to animate the oil. Any liquid in general because I don't believe I ever animated liquid before. This was surely going to be challenge. The first thing I did was look up references, to see how liquids are formed and then transfer that into a 2D image. Then I looked up some videos on the topic on YouTube to see how others do it. But because I got to get this out as fast as possible, I couldn't spend too much time on it, so I have to just learn as I go, and here is what I have done.

The first thing I decided to work on was cut 9.

This is the cut where you just see Yuuma's foot in the test video, but I redrew it to a more dynamic angle. But the more important part here is the oil. This is my first attempt at drawing it, using stock video of a woman splashing water. This one specifically:

https://www.istockphoto.com/video/copy-space-unrecognizable-woman-tourist-runs-into-shallow-ocean-water-at-sunset-gm941530684-257339788

I'm going to be honest, I'm not too satisfied with how it came out, but this is my first time so I figure I'll come back and redraw it at a later time, after I gotten some more experience drawing oil splashing in other cuts. Though it may be due to the choppy animation, but that could either be due to the frame rate, which I'll fix later.

Here it is, the combat cut finally finished, or so I say right now. After I finished this, I saw an error that I have to fix, but you probably don't notice it. What you probably now notice is that it now has more frames, so it's much smoother now so you can probably tell what is happening. But of course the main thing to notice is the oil splashing around. You have to understand that the oil is working with the established frames set by the characters. It actually needs more frames in order for this to look good because the character sand the oil are two completely different things in terms of animation. As in the oil is being animated separately. I might just have add those frames, and I'll probably will once I figure out a better way to animate it. I was actually outlining the oil like anything else, but then discovered as I was painting the oil for this cut that maybe I shouldn't outline it. The reason why it's colored in this cut is because it was too chaotic to tell what the oil was doing as an outline. And because the outlines were just scratches, I had to patch the missing lines.

But instead of using lines, I just used blobs to block out the openings. That's what I should've done from the beginning. Instead of trying to outline the oil, something I can't figure out due to oil being liquid, I should just blotched in the oil with a thick line. That's what I'm going to do from here on as it should help me animate the oil much better.

And one last thing to note is that I was working on adding the pattern on Yuuma's dress, but figured this was going so fast that I might as well do that during the coloring stage. It's just redundant to add that feature when the footage is going so fast right now.

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Progress is going to be slow this December but at the same time I'm still working on it diligently. I really want this animation to be out sometime in the next 2 - 3 months, but the second phase will take time as I just get everything right. Sketches take a long time because I'm thinking about how to improve the animation. But once that step is done, then everything else is just a process to follow. My desire is to finish the second phase by this month and finally move on to finalizing this animation.