Abbymations: Abby's bountiful boobspansion (Early Access)! (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description:

Sometimes, even I forget how busty Abby is supposed to b-Oh, who am I kidding? We all know I was just looking for an excuse to play with abby's boobs!  (you'd think she'd be more surprised, but she's just happy not to be tied up!)

The Rant:

So, fun story, but first, did you know that I have a backlog of unfinished animations?

It's true! 

sometimes, I'll start an animation and get just far enough that the only thing left to do is theoretically clean it up. But because I don't want to spend that time doing that, I'll usually tuck the file away and come back later when I feel like working on it.  I'd like to believe that its for whenever I'm pressed to meet a deadline, but the animation usually takes just enough time that it's generally not the best idea to save it as a backup.

In this case, I'd made the animatic for this boob expansion animation a WHILE ago. Apparently November 2019? 

And then I sat on it. Probably some Abbycaper deadline that needed meeting, or some such. Either way, for some reason, I put this in the backlog and didn't re-approach it until now?

Anyway, I figured now was a good time to re-approach this project and get it animated. I figured, since I'd already done the hard parts of timing it out and laying out the symbols, I could just clean up on top of it, do some tweening, and I'd be set, right?

Wrong.

What went wrong? I'd put all the assets on the same layer.

This is the adobe animate user interface. The bottom part is the timeline:

The timeline is the equivalent of the layers pallet in most illustration software. it's also the reason I don't really like the idea of illustration software as an equal equivalent to animation software.

It's closed in this image, but let's dig into Abby's rig and see what's really cooking under the hood:

All of those layers are the individual parts of Abby's body (hence the rainbow outline coalition in the stage view). And you'll note that not everything follows the same keyframing. Some tweens end early, some extend past where others stop. This allows for stuff like Abby's trademark jiggle. But it doesn't work if everything is on the same layer. It can be done manually sure, but then your onion skins tend to look very weird when you have to look at everything at once....

as opposed to one thing at a time (just the head symbols have onion skins):

It's also a pain to separate everything, because when you separate a frame into different layers, you're only doing so, for that frame. Every other frame needs to have that done manually, and if you've already beated out the animatic, its pretty infeasible to manually separate every frame into layers unless it's a very short animation.

Since I hadn't done that with the roughs (and Abby's design had been slightly modified since then), all I had was the existing animatic. Everything else would need to be redone from scratch.

Surprisingly, that wasn't the hard part. 

What was actually hard was how long the animation is.

You know how most of my animations are short loops? And how, when they aren't, its usually a slideshow with some animation breakups? That's because long animations are exponentially harder than shorter ones. The longer the animation, the exponentially longer the workflow process is.  Sure, Abby is holding longer than she's moving, but that's still a lot of frustrating work. 

This is made harder by the slower action Abby takes towards the end; standing up. Its slower, and harder to fake, because its easier to notice the transitions. Luckily, Abby's a snappy gal, so I was able to speed through it. It also helps that she's very cartoony, so your brains do a lot of the work of filling in the blanks for me. Yay!

Something that also made my life easier was being able to automate Abby's initial idle loop and "check" loops, rather than just copying and pasting the animation frames over and over again.

All things considered, I'm glad I waited though. I think this is some of the finest Abbymation I've ever done, especially with her current consistent design.

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!