Progress Update #92 (Patreon)

It's half-way done! I assumed that things would be faster with this one since I'm not doing any painting in Photoshop, but that's clearly not the case. These watercolor and stop motion effects are way too heavy for After Effects. I've had multiple slow downs, crashes, and I even lost a couple hours of work on one occasion, which was very frustrating. I don't even think the effects were on at the time, all I did was move a shape layer and the program just stopped responding... Sometimes AE is just broken.

Technical issues aside, the look of the watercolor effect was really bothering me. It worked very well with those images I posted in the previous update because the characters were the main focus and occupied most of the frame. But when you actually see it in the animation, where the composition is different and there's a lot more empty space on screen, the background colors look a bit washed out and those outlines just don't look right on the smaller elements. So I decided to remove the effect for now, but I might tweak it and try it again before the animation is done.

I thought it would be fun to have Sana's limiter change shape to reflect her emotions! Even though she has a very simple design (compared to the rest of Council) it still takes a lot of time to animate her, especially those pigtails and ribbons with all that secondary motion. The second part of the animation is going to feature her New Year costume, and I was just about to write: "Which should be easier to animate.", but I'm looking at it now, and there's nothing easy about this dress. I'm also realizing now that I forgot to add Yatagarasu to some of these scenes, I'll make sure to correct this later!

By the way, did I mention that I'm once again using the NES Ducktales OST? It's the Himalayas track this time, which has nothing to do with space, but somehow it really fits. Very catchy tune! That whole soundtrack is just amazing 🎶 ♫ 🕺