Progress Update #26 (Patreon)

Hey everybody! Sorry for the lack of updates, I'm working nonstop on the episode right now and I made some major changes to part 2:

Yup, It got a little bit longer. I wanted to make things funnier, and I got some new ideas while I was animating. So I mixed things up and added new sequences! But I spent most of my time working on a specific scene. You can see part of it in the gif.

It's a scene where Woolie talks about how people "lost their minds" back when Shadow was announced (I was one of them!), and I think that the best way to recreate that is by using a couple of gullible children: Tails and Cream! They are not full rigs (yet), but I can still animate some basic actions.

I went with Green Hill zone for the background, because I wanted to show the contrast between shadow and the old sonic games. I vectorized most of the classic GH sprites, and I was able to get it done pretty fast, mostly because of the design of the environment, Sega was totally going for an early polygonal look. It's full of very sharp basic shapes, except for the clouds, I took some creative liberty with those :p

Oh boy! Let me talk about the Shadow Cadillac. Trying to vectorize anything with a metallic surface is a real mess (especially in after effects), and then trying to animate said vector is really something else! The tires are actually 3D, I modeled something basic in Maya to help with the animation. And I spent a lot of time tweaking the glint effect, experimented a lot with directional blur and ended up buying the starglow plugin from Red Giant, which has no rotation control by the way, and that's kind of a big deal! Here's a protip if you want to deal with that. Thankfully I got a very good result in the end, it almost looks like that old school anime glow.

So I gotta be honest with you guys, I screwed up real bad! Because I was supposed to be working on part 3 by now, and there's still a ton of stuff to do before I finish part 2. I was making good progress on the pony animation last month, so I thought I had a good grasp on the amount of work required for the other scenes, but it's clear now that I underestimated the project. The last thing that I want is for this to turn into another Fallout 4 situation! So I'm gonna go over the audio for part 3 later and make some cuts.