Comic Report #64.3 - The Long Road (Patreon)

When I take a long time to make something like this I sometimes feel guilty about how long it takes to put together, but when I step back from my workspace I can see that the long work time is because of how many small moving parts there are, and they all take time to make; the end product I want requires those parts and so if I want to realize my vision I have to put the time into making sure all the little gears and springs are in place.  This week's art push has taken me about halfway through the second and largest of the two big work difficulty spikes, once I can get through this it should be an easy downhill from there.  So this week I'll be taking a look at how panels 2 and 3 of this comic fit together.

Panel 2 of this page is an easy bit of prep work, and is I think more about the norm of what previous pages' animations end up working like.  Everything is largely in place where it needs to be and the primary animation is this bus segment sliding to the side, revealing the Omni-Mart truck.

It's fairly simple but there's a few effects I wanted to include to get the feel of this shot just right.  The first and most central of these is the rumbling of the truck.  There's a specific aesthetic to how an enormous combustion engine feels- from the vibrations of the belts spinning, the metal casing shifting, the heat coming off- that I feel the best approach is to combine a number of subtle animations.  In the header image for this article you can see my component parts, after I painted the truck I split it up into pieces that I could move subtley, mainly the front grill, the headlights and the bumper.  To achieve the grill rattle I duplicated my grill piece and increased the size of the copy slightly, so every other frame I alternate between normal and slightly-larger grill, giving the main engine housing a sort of central rumbling feel.  The headlight units are one piece but to capture their vibration I shifted their position vertically every other frame, so while the engine core is pulsing in and out the headlights are bobbing up and down, giving me a kind of oscillating rumble feel.  I thought about if I wanted to make the bumper rattle too but I felt it might distract from the nice central rumble animation, so it's just a mask to cover up the increasing size of the grill segment.  On top of this, I made three different misty aura halos to play behind the truck, since the main engine rumbling is a two-frame cycle I made the outer vibration a three-cycle to give the animation timing a bit more depth.  These little details combined, I think, make the truck feel like it's actually running in the shot.

As the front gate piece slides to the side I have two copies of the wall bus on the left stacked on top of each other.  To kinda simulate the light from outside pouring in when the gate opens up I pick some frames of the bus slide animation and drop the opacity of the top, dark layer a few notches, so as the animation progresses it looks like that wall piece is lightening up.  It's very simple, low-effort but I think it gets the job done.

Deon and Donna are hanging out on the other side of the bus gate. I don't want them to be standing stone-still so what I did was I painted them nicely and then applied an effect I practiced in my game sprites to give them a subtle breathing animation.  By kinda sliding pieces and expanding the chest segment I can take a three-frame cycle and make it look like breathing, like here in these game sprites:

That effect is applied for Deon and Donna too.  In the final animation I'll add some more hold frames after the bus passes to let the engine rumble and the breathing cycles play a bit more, but for demo purposes it's there.

To add a last bit of flourish to panel 2's animation I wanted to add a little misty swirl effect, like as the bus gate opens to reveal the truck there's this whoosh in front of it, like ta da!  Here is something!  I whipped up this little dust cloud real quick with a translucent soft-edge paint brush, I think it gets the job done nicely.  But that, with all the other little pieces combined, is the panel 2 reveal shot.  Which brings us to the challenging piece to animate.

Panel 3 is the nightmare shot.  This is the one I've been dreading working on the whole time leading up to this page, but I'm currently about halfway through it so there's only halfway more to go.  The thing that makes this shot in particular a killer for me is, I think, a great example of the difference in work between a comic writer and a comic artist.  Like, here is the shot I am working on in writing:

"A crowd of people gather around an intersection. The main characters arrive from off-panel, turning their attention towards the camera.  The shadow of a large truck approaches from the south edge of the frame."

That's easy to write, and probably took me about ten seconds to compose.  What this means artistically is I need to look up and render all of these incidental characters correctly to their previous appearances and animate individual frames of the main characters running into the shot.  The sort of animation this shot calls for is not like the truck engine where I can just chop up a painting and move it around, I'm going to have to paint ~60 individual little mini paintings to get them running into the shot just right.

I'd hoped to have all four characters running into the shot animated by today, but looking back that feels like it was biting off a bit more than I could handle.  What I did do is streamline a process for getting all of these art assets prepared.  Like with my game art I tend to start with Lizzie first as the animation guinea pig, it tends to be easy to apply processes I come up with drawing her to everyone else.

What I've been doing to draw these outlines is copy the core of the character- the head and torso- and copy them onto other frames, where I'll then animate the arms and legs separately.  Going back from the end I edited her head to give her the blink and head-turn towards camera, to kinda help make it feel more organic while keeping the workload somewhat efficient.  I initially drew her with just the forward arm in place, and decided to put her mop in her left hand since that would be easier to do.  After drawing the main body animation I went through and dropped in a copy of a mop drawing behind each frame, moving it around to kinda balance against the other arm's motion, and then ink in the arm connecting her shoulder to the hand on the mop.  

My plan to approach painting these figures is similar to how I penciled and inked them: if I copy the rough center of the painting from one frame I can just paste it into the next frame's animation and have ~70% of the work already done, then it's just small edits and letting the inks convey the difference.  I'll probably end up inking everyone first so I know they all fit together and then paint the interior details in.  After that I'll just have to add cast shadows and ground reflections and then the shot will be complete!

I'll be spending this week, again, pushing hard to finish this page.  I do expect this page to be done in June, and I kinda feel in my bones like I can get it finished either in this comic week cycle or in the weekend after next Friday's report.  The next shots after this one coming up are honestly extremely easy to realize in comparison to where I am now, so once I get this done I'll be home free.  

Thank you again for being patient with this long process.  I sorta set myself up for this way back in 2008?ish, and I intend to see it through.  The 100-pages have a standard to live up to, and if this is going to be the last one I want to make sure it's worth it.