Progress Update #91 (Patreon)

Sana announced that she is graduating this month. I was very surprised and sad because she is my favorite member from Council. She's also an amazing artist (the best in all of hololive) so I hope to see more of her work in the future!

As soon as I saw the announcement I started working on a Sana animation, so the Kiara and Reine animation is on hold for now.

I also made this little loop of a Sanalite breakdancing (I'm sure most of you guys have seen this meme by now). And I'm experimenting with this new art style for the animation. It kinda resembles a watercolor painting and it took a lot of precomps and adjustment layers to achieve the look. I'm still tinkering with it, and I'm not sure if I'm going to use it in the final animation, but I'm gonna teach you guys how to replicate it:

The first step is to draw your shape layer. Shape paths are required for the animated effect, but if you just want the watercolor texture you can skip to step four.

The second step is to add the Wiggle Paths modifier to the shapes and add the Roughen Edges effect to the layers. These effects change based on the resolution of your composition and layer sizes, so you'll have to adjust the scale attributes of each effect to your liking. And make sure to set the Wiggle/Second to 0.

Step three, add this expression to the random seed attributes:

posterizeTime(3);
time*3

It will change the random seed value three times per second, creating an animated effect. You can increase both numbers if you want a higher refresh rate.

Step four, precomp your composition, create a new solid on top of it, set the blending mode to overlay, and add the fractal noise effect. Increase the contrast to the max and lower the layer opacity to around 5%, also add the same expression from step three to the random seed attribute. The scale of the noise is up to you, but I personally like to duplicate this layer and keep one large and one small fractal noise. It helps simulate the paper and ink texture.

Step five, add an adjustment layer on top, set the blending mode to multiply and add the Find Edges effect to it. Add a little bit of gaussian blur too if things get too sharp.

Watercolor painting has a lot of dark saturated edges at the border of each color, and the Find Edges effect helps a lot with that. Duplicate your precomp, bring it to the top and apply the effect to it. You have to keep iterating until you get a satisfying result and it depends a lot on the colors that you used in your original shape or image. I find that the lighter colors work best.

If you're still having trouble with it, check out this video here: https://youtu.be/f8CaaIK2f_E There's a lot of other super useful tutorials and tips on this channel too!