Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #4 (Patreon)

Good afternoon folks. I hope you're all having a nice weekend. So it's the end of week four on the latest Dungeons and Dragons bullshittery. Not the most thrilling update I'm afraid, as work has continued smoothly with no major pitfalls.

I'm currently animating puppet 4 of 9. The nobleman "Eandor of Corlin" but this time played by Digby. Since Waffle wasn't able to make the second game on the following weekend. And this week has consisted of keyframing eyeball, eyebrow, mouth and body movement as per usual. Trying to match the conversation patterns and give them more expressive body-language.

Therefore character progress looks like this:

Since this next week will be the maximum time allocation on this project (for the moment), I'd really like to get Digby's puppet done and sent over to the artist. Then they'll have a full four characters to work through and hopefully have ready before next time.

All the backgrounds have been completed and nothing more needs to be done on that front. It's now just the characters.

A key gag in the episode is that Digby's character is a high-born with no useful combat abilities whatsoever. Therefore I'd asked the artist to draw him with a very expensive looking weapon (with jewels encrusted) and I'll have him admire/inspect it at every opportunity.

In some of his poses I'm also making it a separate object, not physically attached to him. This gives me the opportunity to make him look like a klutz by dropping it often. Adding metallic clanging sounds as it hits the floor. And I might even play with having the jewels glint and shine in the fire-light. I was going to sit down and play with dynamic shadows and lightning near the end of the project. Notably for things like fireballs, campfires, gemstones in the cave walls, etc.

The only other thing to note is that After Effects is absolutely terrible at handling even the slightest alteration to file names. If there's a rogue full-stop or underscore somewhere, then After Effects immediately has a hissy-fit and displays giant multi-coloured rectangles

Suddenly your party of adventurers is replaced by this bullshit:

And this happens for anything! Even a single character missing/incorrect in a single random layer. And then you've got to faff around trying to figure out which After Effects composition has the missing asset and force it to refresh itself. Which isn't always easy because the cartoon is, by its very nature, a composite of compositions. There's usually 5-6 of them per scene.

So this has been me several times this week:

This did however result in a moment where it looked as though the goblin archers were taking the piss. Having replaced their arrows with something more appropriate.

So I'll spend a maximum of one more week on this project. Thank you for letting me do so.

In unrelated news, I'm continuing to gather highlights for many other games. Most notably DayZ. The clan have returned to it this week and have been enjoying ourselves. Combined with other clips recorded previously, a future Random DayZ Bullshittery (part 15) or even 16 seems very doable if you're interested?

I'll send more updates this week concerning the next project and you can tell me what you'd like. Shall work as hard on this last week. Get as much done as I can.