Roe stag animation behind the scenes (Patreon)

Wow, quite an animation, and it made me realize that 2D paperdolll puppet animations don't need to be a painful and mostly laggy experience when you don't have the 'right' program for it. Well. I learned the right program might just be Blender.

While i create this, i tried to refrain from utilising the 3D tools at my disposal. Volumetrics is where I drew the line for now, but can you imagine generating painterly backdrops and including normal mapping for even more light interaction...ho boy. I need to stop myself before I go overboard.

Simply put, I started in an art program where I assembled the needed pieces together, or rather, test pieces, they may still changed! If it was a puppet, I had to seperate the pieces but I also added a 'template' to know how to assemble it back again. In blender I varied the mesh to 'encircle' around the images so I could isolate them into individual pieces. Some of the tree branches are built in a way to allow independant animating. 

The stag too, sometimes has 'bendy' segments like the neck, which helps with further deformations.

The scene was later assembled and for good measure I added two layers of fog. Distance and ground mist.

I additionally also exported a paralaxing segment.