Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #2 (Patreon)

So I've had almost a week on the latest project and things are going pretty well.

My current objective is to use the time that you've given me to get as much of the pre-visualisation for D&D (made mostly made in Sony Vegas) into a true cartoon using Adobe After Effects. And to that end, what I've been doing is gradually replacing all of the nine characters with custom made After Effects "puppets".

These are either crudely scribbled drawings, or assets from the design phase (like the bug-bear design above), that I can then animate as if they were final. Moving their eyes and arms around, etc, on the assumption that the artist I'm commissioning can simply draw over them later if I provide the correct photoshop layers with the right names.

For example, this from the pre-vis:

Becomes a puppet and looks like this:

I then setup each puppet with a selection of idle animations and repeatable gestures exported to a master file. For things like blinking, or fidgeting. This lets me recycle the most frequently used animations so I don't have to custom keyframe everything. And generally gives the puppets much more life, even when they're just standing around in the background. They don't look like lifeless dolls.

I figured the best place to start would be the least complicated puppets. Therefore I went with character 1 of 9, the mage Idowa played by ZF DigitalVagrant. Taking the design from the design phase and scribbling over it:

On that front, though not 100% animated, I have managed to puppeteer every possible stance and about 80% of his scenes. And have felt comfortable enough to send the files over to the artist for drawing over. So in one week I've almost completed 1 of 9 characters.

Here are some examples of what I've done with Idowa's puppet (Gif quality might be a bit pants to keep the file sizes down, sorry):

So the puppet making process is going well and I'm moving onto the next characters. Replacing backgrounds as I go.

Additionally, this week has produced some amusing results. It turns out that when you export from  Sony Vegas into Adobe Premiere, and then from Premiere into After Effects, some properties are retained when they really shouldn't be. Or anchor points are reset. Or After Effects just can't find the files and refuses to display them.

This has resulted in some moments of utter weirdness:

So the animation continues into week two. All is going well and I'm very much enjoying making this. Thank you for letting me xx