dabbling in animation? - paper mario style peepo (Patreon)

baby's first animations! you may have seen these if you follow my twitter, but if not, this is the full quality version so you can see all the little errors :D

still had paper mario style on the brain. i got the idea to make a poseable doll, but then realized...if i'm going through the trouble to make the pieces, why not make them move around? that's how the games animate!

i drew this peepo with many moving parts and alternative pieces in clip studio paint, imported all the pieces to blender 2.82, and dug into actually animating for the first time. i got too excited to prepare a rig for these test animations, so they do not use bones and are purely transform-based which is probably... more trouble than it's worth. i plan on experimenting with a rig today or tomorrow for the flexibility and consistency

here are a couple of gifs cycling through the 24 individual parts, if you're curious:

drawing and individually coloring and shading all of the parts quite a long time but there was something strangely relaxing about it for me... layering the pieces and matching the markings/soft shadows was like one big puzzle

i'd really like to continue exploring this and maybe create paper mario puppet style commissions for folks, with the option to throw in some looping animations like these