TH17.5 short progress #11 (Patreon)

I've been so busy that I forgot to update you guys earlier. I wanted to show you the compositing with Yuuma and I just ended up going into a sort of crunch as I'm now racing to get this finished by the first week of March. Time is not on my side now so I'm putting in overtime to get this animation in the next two weeks. So I took some time from working on the funnies to update you guys right now as I may not have another chance to update you guys.

And here we see what the frames look like finished, but this is not what it's going to look like in the final product. I'm just adding the details for the benefit of video editor as there are some things I need to do manually, like shading. This manual adding of detail is going to be used in conjunction with the video editor's effects.

The following are more of the test done with the video editor adding its own lighting effects.

This is a GIF, in case you just take a glimpse.

I was testing this with a red gradient and a spotlight and it created this very contrasting look, and if you have seen my old art, you should know that I love this chiaroscuro look, so I'm very pleased that it came out like this. I just hope it ends up looking the same when I do the real thing.

Another dramatic shot. I'm really loving the contrast here. But there's a problem with using the lighting from the video editor. The background get affected by it. I used the same gradient and spotlight as I did before and placed it on the light source, but as you can see it ended up losing a lot of it's value. I think I can fix this by overlaying the same background above the edited one, but I don't know how to do that without covering the character. I'll try experimenting but I don't know if I can fix this with such a tight deadline.

Ignore that ring on the right side. I have no idea why it appears when I take a screenshot but it's not there during editing.

A really cool close up. I want to do something about the eye on the right. I feel that should be reflecting light instead of absorbing it.

But as much as I Iove the dark scenes, the rest of the short will take place lit up, so I have to come up with a different lighting system for that section.

These are just four test out of many I did but I didn't want to make a gif with a whole bunch of images, so I'll just show you the thumbnail.

But none of these worked for me. I felt Yuuma looked too lifeless in all of them. And after doing some experimentation, I came to the conclusion that I need to remove one layer of shading and replace it with an extra layer or red but I have to add this manually. I can't do it with the video editor, it has to be done by hand.

So I did just that and this is the result:

Now I feel it's an improvement. Though I didn't get a chance to try it with Flandre, but the time to test and experiment is over. I have to get these done so from here on, I'm testing as I go. This animated short has to come out ASAP!

I'll most likely update you guys after this compositing process is done and I'll show actual screen caps of the final look. I might even give you a little preview of the animation as well to see these images in motion with the compositing. Stay tuned cause there's still so much left to do.