AmberLoop (Patreon): The (Nabbicle) struggle is real. (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description: 

 Heron Angel's fierce Sol-cleric Amber sure is feisty!
You would be to if you were restrained and molest-I mean, caressed by slime/goo tentacles!  

The Rant: 

This is is actually an interesting time to talk about frame rate an animation smoothness. For reference, disclosure, this animation is still 24 frames per second, BUT there are only 7 frames, running on intervals of 5 (every drawing lasts for 4-5 frames before moving on to the next one). This does have the net effect of making the animation a little choppy, sure, but it also pushes emphasis on the individual poses and how they connect to each other, rather than the motion as a whole.

So why do this?

The social media analyst's answer is "Laziness:" i.e. I could have smoothed it out, but I chose not to. To a certain extent, they're right in that I did very much choose not to smooth out the animation (if you were there for the stream where I did this, you can see parts of that throughout the VoD) However, this was more out of pragmatism, than an express desire not to do more. My current priorities are:

• SaunterWing (and associated projects)
• My SFW indie content (and associated projects)
• My dayjob work (and associated projects)

Even if I did do some/a lot of trimming, there just never would be enough time to do every project to my own levels of perfection. There just isn't, and so I have to be pragmatic about how I tackle each project so it gets done in an acceptable time period. Would people notice if I didn't add extra frames? Possibly/probably. Would most people care? Probably not. If I can get away with the same audience reaction with five frames as I can with ten, and that would allow me to do/focus on more projects, why wouldn't I?

That's how most studios and professional artists operate by necessity. Doing the bare-est minimum possible WELL, allows you to focus on the elements you do include. It also keeps the ever expanding budget from inflating on superfluous content, allows you to take on more work, and reduces the amount of work/time needed for troubleshooting bugs (story issues, animation issues, actual coding bugs) by reducing the number of areas a bug could be found, and granting you more time for fixing the few bugs that do show up. You just get more done that way, and level grind faster, too. 

"'Perfect' is the enemy of the 'good.'"

The other reason for the frame rate is consistency.
Consistency of illustration is hard enough when you're just thinking about the lines, and how they feed into the previous following frames to create a cohesive animation. This gets a lot harder when lighting is thrown into the mix, because, unlike color, lighting tends to depend on a variety of factors that shift with every new frame. You might have lighting that looks good in individual frames, but creates a chaotic mess because they don't feed into each other as an animation.

One workaround to this is to make each asset its own individual piece, render its own lighting (shadows, highlights, specular, etc) and then only manipulate them after the fact. This can work (and is great for sprite work), but becomes a problem with a full sequence and multiple characters where that just isn't feasible. You can see that in a lot of what I do, since I do a lot of short loops nowadays, but I didn't think it'd work here, so I didn't use it.

Either way, I like the different turn this has taken, and I'll be experimenting more with it in the future. I haven't found the right consistency yet, but we'll get there by the end of the year!

 What do you think? Let me know in the comments! Your feedback lets me know how I'm doing! Thank you for your continued support and patronage, and I'll catcha over yonder! 

-Saunter!

The Pitch:

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