Linus Close-up - Scene Progression (Patreon)

Here is a progression of an all-3D Linus scene with the varying frame rate and custom toon lines that emulate the hand-drawn animation.

The original teaser footage of Linus featured a 3D train with a hand-drawn face. For the revival of the film on Patreon, a robust facial rig was added to the train that could achieve all of the idiosyncratic model sheet poses of the original hand-drawn performances. This saved considerable amounts of time in the pipeline.

The toon lines are generated in Maya/Arnold in art-directed spots on the model, and then given additional treatments in After Effects to match the frayed edges and consistency of the drawn human characters. Adjustments are made as needed to marry all of the elements in a scene.

Sometimes train scenes are animated on 2s and 1s natively in Maya. Other times they are splined all on 1s and converted later in After Effects, depending on what is easier to polish for the scene.

More to come!

Your humble engineer,
Andrew