TH17.5 short progress #8 (Patreon)

Now that the Christmas Special is over (or at least will be when the epilogue is finally done), it's back to my regular schedule and back to working on the TH17.5 short. I'll have more info about the status of the entire thing on the next bi-weekly but for this entry, I just want to update you on what I have been tasked with currently and that is drawing the oil.

I have now been given a doze of reality about my animation skills as I found this to be quite difficult. No matter what reference I look at or what tutorial I look up, I just couldn't get it. I guess a little over a year of animation practice isn't enough to prepare me for this challenge. But I proceeded anyway, trying to figure out what to do, and that's when I decided to just admit my limitations and took a lesson from the funnies: rotoscope the darn thing.

Maybe not rotoscoping as even tracing water is time consuming. I guess what I did was just use stock videos as reference and only selected a few frames to trace over. So it's a little of both, but in the end of the day, I had to get this done somehow. So here are a few examples of how I handled animating liquids.

I believe this was my first attempt at tracing water footage. Turns out I didn't align it well with the character because it looks too small compared to the stomp Yuuma is doing, as well as too high. But I think a solution is to simply increase the size of the splash. That might fix it. If not, then I might have to redraw it.

I guess it's alright but perhaps I should use a better reference. Problem with that is finding the right reference is quite difficult. I sometimes have to work with the limited resources there are. The footage used for this could be any stock video you can find, so perhaps the actual footage itself may have seemed fine but transforming it into animation may have caused it to look different. 

Another one that looks too small. Since Flandre is landing, the splash should be bigger. Another situation where simply enlarging the splash should fix it.

After drawing all these, all I can say is that I probably will not be drawing any more liquids anytime soon, or if I have to, I'll use a reference. For now, this should do for the short.

Now that the oil has been dealt with, my second pass continues and I'm now at the final stages. Now I'm working on mouth flaps and blinks, which is by far easier to do. In fact, one good way to achieve this is to do what I have done in the funnies to save time and that's to overlay features.

I'm going to use the traditional anime style of keeping the head still and moving the eyes and mouth for this which consists of only three images for the mouth and eyes followed by a blank face. 

Though I need to redraw the mouth because it looks too static and need to play around with the frame rate, it's practically what you would expect. Nothing too complicated and it just works.

That's all for now. The second pass continues and it can't pass fast enough as I feel like I've been working on the sketches for too long. It's finally time to move on to the cleanup so I'm going to aim to get these done as quickly as I can.