Sweet ass - Description of the creation and PSD source (Patreon)

Dear friends. Today I will tell you how I made this little animation. Usually I do everything (including animations) in Photoshop, but in this case, for the first time, part of the work was done in the Blender program with modeling tools and the 2D animation tool in 3D space Grease Pencil.

So, first there was an idea in my head about how Tails licks Sonic at the moment when Sonic is on Amy (which I think is very sexy 😋). I have 3D models of Sonic, Tails and Amy (which I partially modified to suit my taste). And I also use the DesignDoll program, in which I can create human figures in the proportions I need, adding external 3D models to them (my own versions of heads, tails, genitals, etc.).

I. Preparation of the 3D scene

1. In the DesignDall program, I made this pose of the characters.

For convenience, in this program, I painted the surface of the body so that their surface showed me the anatomy in order to better imagine where the muscles are going. This is all very approximate, but it helps.

2. I exported this pose to an OBJ file and opened in the Blender program. Adjusted Tails' head so that his mouth was open, added a tongue. With the standard animation tools in the Blender, I added several keyframes with the adjusted position of body parts:

And as a result, I got this kind of animation (very roughly done, but sufficient for further work).

II. Drawing in a Blender

3. The Grease Pencil tool in the Blender program is a very cool thing for 2D animation. By creating a Grease Pencil object, we can draw 2D images in a 3D environment and animate them!

The first thing I did was draw a very rough sketch. This is how it looks in the program:

Here's how it looks in our 3D environment:

4. In the Blender (as in all 2D animation programs) there is a convenient tool: "Onion skin". This tool displays on the screen what the next and previous frames look like, so that we can more accurately draw our current intermediate frame between them.

The Blender also has line transformation tools (sculpting tools) that make it easy to adjust the result.

Here's what it looks like in the process. Here the red line is the line that we are drawing now. And the blue and green lines are the next and previous frames (which I have already drawn by this point).

5. Result: a very rough sketch of the future animation:

6. Now I need to draw a neat lineart. Unfortunately, there are no brushes in the Blender right away that I would like. So I decided to make my own brush! To do this, I saved various interesting "casts" of brushes to import them in the settings of the stroke shape of Grease Pencil.

Here are all the "stamps" of the brushes that I have saved for myself:

By the way, you can download the archive with these stamps at this link: disk.yandex.ru/d/SL0wMdswTntgjw 

After experimenting, I chose option 11. I have set the following brush parameters, and this is how it looks up close:

7. In the same way as I drew a rough sketch, I carefully drew a lineart. Here is the result:

III. Work in Photoshop

8. Part of the following work could have been done in a Blender, but I switched to Photoshop, which is more convenient for me. First of all, I created a "Video Timeline" and set the desired frame rate (in this case, it is 6 fps)

I imported the resulting linart there at the previous stage. For each frame, I drew a flat color (without volume, shadows, highlights, etc.). And immediately, on top of everything, I manually drew a sketch of how the liquid drops would move.

9. And now let's remember that we had rendered animation of three-dimensional figures (it was in paragraph 2). We will need it to create volume. Of all the rendered frames, I took these three for myself (lower, middle and high position):

10. And then I detailed frame by frame and adjusted the original render to the resulting lineart, adding details, muscles, folds, etc (using the usual brushes and other tools carefully). This is how the original renderer of these 3 frames look (left) and the resulting animated layer with volume (right):

11. And then everything is simple. In exactly the same way as in cases with static art, I apply volume. On top of the layer with a flat color, I repeatedly applied one layer with volume in different modes to get a beautiful result. And so for each frame (by the way, there are 7 frames in total here).

12. And then everything is even easier. With each frame, I did the same thing I did for static art (which you can read in any of the previous explanations of the art creation process): I added glare in the eyes, a little extra light on the ass, made a color lineart. I also detailed the splashes.

And at the end I added general color correction, chromatic aberrations (yes, I did them for each frame) and a little noise.

By the way, about how I add noise, I will write a small separate post. It's simple, but it's better to show it with a separate example.

You can see the animation in full size at this link: patreon.com/posts/sweet-ass-hires-85359754 

And as a result, I got such a cute animation. The process is a bit complicated, and I'm not sure I've explained all the steps in enough detail. If you have any questions, or you want to clarify this or that nuance, then I will be happy to answer you in the comments.

Link to PSD-source with all layers of animation, volume overlay, highlights, effects, etc: disk.yandex.ru/d/YTnq2eBLOIKThA 

You can study in detail how everything works here.

P.S. I am still learning how to make such animations, and I understand that this way of mine is far from perfect. But the result is quite cute and original. And I will try new tools and methods, so if I find some cool interesting tools, I will be happy to share my findings with you! 😉

I hope it was interesting, and see you again! =^_^=