Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #5 (Patreon)

So it's the end of the five week detour on Random Dungeons and Dragons bullshittery and I think things have gone pretty well.

The video, which once consisted of some very simple Sony Vegas layers sketched in Photoshop, is now looking much more like a true cartoon. With each scene now made up of numerous After Effects compositions, forming a composite of characters. With their own detailed mouth movement, eyeball movement, idle animations, etc. Giving each one much more life than they would otherwise.

So in these five weeks I've managed to do the following:

• Complete the design stage for all of the principle characters. Fleshing out their overall look (the warrior, the thief, the mage, etc)
• Replace the 53 backgrounds with properly done versions by a commissioned artist.
• Create animated "puppets" for 4 of 9 characters.
• Create a master composition of idle/blinking animations for each puppet to use when they're not talking.
• Receive final assets for 2 of the 9 characters and imported them into the cartoon. 2 more have been given to the artist.

So I estimate that there's about 15 weeks of work left to finish the animation. Mainly because the Soviet and Cyanide puppets are likely going to be very complicated. But thus far it's been a good start.

The character progress sheet looks like this:

Whilst Carton's version of Eandor of Corlin was fairly straight forward, I'm finding Digby a bit more slow going. This is because he was involved in  multiple long speaking sequences. Such as the Bugbear negotiation scene. And these take a while to properly animate, what with the large number of mouth shapes and gestures.

The Bugbear assets (character 2 of 9) came back from the artist. Including both regular bugbears and the main boss "Clarg", with better looking equipment. And I think they're looking great. 

And puppets for characters 3 and 4 have just been sent. I'm liking how you can see the contrast between old assets and the new puppets. You can see the cartoon starting to take shape, one character at a time.

So what I'm going to do now is place this on the back-burner once again and then begin the next bullshittery project. Thank you sincerely for letting me spend some time with this. Hoping to gradually creep it closer and closer to completion. Maybe a week here, a week there, if and when you're happy for me to do so.

I'll make a follow up message about the next project to gather your thoughts. Many thanks folks.