Abbymations: Abby's HoppleDress hooplah! (Early Access) (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description:

Wouldn't Abby look cute in one of @rebake1453's hopple-dresses?  

I thought so, and so I snuck Abby in one of them!
Doesn't she look cute trying desperately to keep from falling over?

The Rant:

This was fun! 

Rebake is a bondage artist I follow on the various social medias, and I came across a restraint design they'd made for kinky art:

I'm not usually one for trends, but this seemed like a no-brainer. Sure, the base pose doesn't leave much imagination for more than wiggling in a pinup drawing, but for an animation? Easy peasy!

The problem? 

I've done a LOT of hobble-hop animations:

Some including Abby!

And some even including multiple variations!

So, if I was gonna do it again, I wanted it to be distinguishable from the other 15 times I'd done a hobble-hop animation.

The one thing I haven't played with in these is "acting." Yes, the girls are all reacting to physics in a way that implies character thought, but I hadn't put much thought into character acting beyond that. So i used this as an opportunity to do that, by playing to Abby's weakness as a character.

We've all joked about, for all of Abby's failings, she has a "reeaaally good" sense of balance, because she never unintentionally falls over in any of the animated scenarios we've put her in. To be honest, that's laziness on my part because not only does all that extra have to be animated when no one cares about it, but how do you plan "unplanned spontaneity?" Do it wrong, and it looks staged (which is why most YouTubers are really bad at cut-away bits; they don't have acting/improv training, and it shows). But, in this case, its mostly laziness stemming from trying to stay ahead of the grind.

So I decided to give Abby balance issues in this one. Having her wobble forwards and backwards before finally catching her balance. I also had her do a little sigh of relief, acknowledging what she had accomplished, what she'd almost lost, and making her seem even more determined to get away. Yay acting, yeah? 

This was harder than normal because the usual indicators, flailing arms and legs, weren't available to me. I'd have to communicate it purely through her pose and expression (though flail-bubbles didn't hurt, but those were for later).

Still, once I had my blocking, the rest was cake. From there, I went on to create my assets, and do my animation. If you're wondering why no hair or boobs in my blocking, its because as secondary/overlapping action, those would be dependent on my primary action (the hop itself). Sure I could do the boobs and such in my blocking, but that was always going to change dependent on how things actually played out.

YOu can see how the head and head floof (what I call the fringe that's always behind her head) are more detailed than the rest? That's because I almost fell into a trap a lot of artists fall into; cleaning up your pre-production before you've finished it. It's not a problem for the head, because it needs that detail, and the floof is relatively consistent and simple (I pretty much draw it the same way every time), but its a problem for the rest, because I hadn't done any pre-production design of Abby's "hopple-dress" look. So if I spent time cleaning up every asset, in addition to animating it, well... you'd be reading this post tomorrow, if it even hit early access. So, I got ahold of myself and turned my brain off while building assets, promising myself that I'd have plenty of time to focus on making them pretty once the animation looked good.

After my animation was roughed out came the cleanup. Something I wanted to do was take a cue from my "Yay" and "mph" reactimotes. 

I think Abby's design and the style of my Flashimate rendering had reached a new level while working on those, and so I wanted to incorporate that going forward.

Specifically:

• Bigger Irises and white sclerae in the eyes
• simplified shading consisting of "spot blacks," shadows, and one layer of highlights (rahter than 3, as I'd been doing before)

I think that simplified the style to something unique and easily distinguishable and replicable, but without losing the appeal of my prior style. So I tried my best to replicate it here.

Once done with shading the rest was pretty simple. Pink and Purple are Abby (and, by extension, Saunter)'s colors, so it made sense for her dress to be that color. What was a pain was both the rest between "phases" (the hop phase, the balance phase and the reassurance phase). The rest made it feel like she'd intended to lose her balance, and was interrupting the flow of he animation, so I chopped those frames out, so she goes straight to losing her balance after her hop. I think that works a lot better.

The other pain was what to do with the rest of the negative space. Because Abby covers a lot of it, but not all at once, it left the scene feeling empty. In the age of animated gifs, this would have been fine on somewhere like DeviantArt, which doesn't mess too much with transparent backgrounds. However, since I post mostly on twitter, which has a frustrating habit of putting a white background behind everything, appropriate or not, this would have ruined the effect. So, at first, I made a black background, but there still would have been too much negative space. So I then added the flailbubble, muffled moans, and spotlight for some impromtu context. I then followed that up with a stick frame to break up the space further. Perfect! I still made the background black, because that was still preferable to Twitter's butchering.

All in all lots of fun, and lots of learned things about myself. I'd love to keep using the hopple-dress. Either as the end result of a forced transformation, or maybe a domme just has one... in Abby's size, for some reason. Who knows?

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!