Avatar the Last Airbender is on of my favorite animated shows, and although the series has been done for a number of years now, they have been producing comics about what happened after the series was over. I have personally been really enjoying these giving us fans a look at what happened to our favorite character as they get older and what helps shapes the world that we see in Legend of Korra.
In the latest comic The Search Part Two we are following most of the gAng with Zuko on his quest to find his mother and at the End of the Book we find a meet a new Spirit the Mother of Faces which I really like the design of.
I wanted to do a simple cut out animation of the character and make a simple gif animation that I could quickly post online. It turned out not quick to do since I expanded my original idea of the project. I was simply going to break it up and place the parts in 3D space in C4d then bring them in to After Effects using the new Cineware plugin and animating them in AE. Creating an animation in only 2D space. But I wanted more control over the Spirit and cineware to work to slow for an efficient workflow.
I ended up doing a full rig for the Spirit in C4D and a more involved camera move that required me to recreate the whole background. I also added some music from audio jungle to add some atmosphere to the animation. I also learned the limits of gif sizes on various sites due my full gif being to large for most site to be posted on so I edited it and made a shorter gif in addition to the long one. Check them out and tell me what you think.
This is my final animation for the I Kill Giants spot for a fictional motion comic. In my previous post I talked about my reasoning behind the project so for this one I thought I would just pick a few scenes from the animation and talk about them and the overall animation.
Overall the animation process went well, I worked in a bit pretty much every night in some fashion. You can see my progress for each day on my 365 project, it pretty much took over for the past week or so. The animation in the beginning up until the action scenes stayed pretty much the same from my original storyboard. I didn’t have any big issues working on those scenes. I did have to take out the artifacts, moiré patterns, which came when I scanned some of the images. It wasn’t big issue on these images but on later ones is was very noticeable.
The I Kill Giants scene that begin the action scenes stayed true to my storyboard/animatic. I added some sfx for the word bubble that might seem somewhat out of place but they match up with the ones that I have at the end. The giant in a row gave me a bit of trouble, the way I envisioned it didn’t translate as well in after effects. So instead of showing each giants full body I opted to just show their heads/upper body. I put a sky from another part of the comic as the back ground so it wasn’t just plain white. Having the motion blur on I think makes it look pretty cool although you can’t really see any detail about any of the giants.
The scene after this with cool perspective looking up at the monster is probably on of my favorite scenes. It was pretty much setup for the way I wanted to animate it and of course it had to roar after you zoom in. The sfx is actually from boss from duke nukem video game. [Random side note: Duke Nukem Forever, the infamous vaporware game for the last decade or so is actually coming. Check out the trailer for some typical duke nukem vulgar awesome action.]
The next scene that gave me some issues was when the hammer comes out of the purse. This 3 part sequence I felt might be kind of quick, but then again I did want this whole part to be quick. The glow out of the purse was another issue with the mask flickering but with the blur it seems to cover it up. I hope I’m not trying to depend on that too much.
The last part I want to talk about is the stillish action pose part where Barbra is holding the hammer. My idea for it was to make it look really cool and somewhat 3D like even though it’s just a 2D plane. Originally I thought of doing some camera projection but I decided to just stay in after effects. I went with have a camera pan around the image plane and had the main part of the hammer on a higher z depth. The made is seemed like it had some dept to it but move way too much. So I just did some key framing to reduce the movement a bit. I think the background gave me the biggest issue as far as what to use. I wound up using a background from another part that was the sky storm.
So above is what I ended up with this was a cool project to work on and I figured out and learned a bunch as always.
I have been working on the same project for a while now and I wanted to try work on something different. I came across this sneaker template psd on deviant art. I though t it would be cool to try and animate a texture on to the sneaker. I never got to the animating part as I just kept working on the design more and more try different things on the shoe.
After all I tried I decide to keep it simple similar to how the comic book it designed with just red and white. I added two images from the comic that I already had broken up with the man of action logo.
I didn’t really have a good title for today but since my comp over heated twice using Photoshop I decide to title this post a feature I wish it had. It seem working with Photoshop files that are 5000px+ by 5000px+ causes my comp to overheat…They where big scans.
Anyway I’ve been working on my I Kill Giants Spot that I should have finished in a few days. You can check out what I have so far on my 365 project. I have the beginning slow parts done, just have to do the giant fighting scenes.
I didn’t get to any animation today but I did make this image while I was working on breaking up the images. It didn’t fit the style I’m going for with the single frame images but I thought it was cool so I kept it. I took an extra 15 mins. to add some more stuff to it to make it look even cooler and below is what I came up with.
I used some water colour paper textures for the edges and some grunge paper over it all to try to bring it together.
I thought the Hammer from I Kill Giants was pretty cool so I wanted to see how it would look translated into 3D. I although that I may do some projection mapping on to it for my IKG spot to have some fake rotation on it.
I the modeling of it was pretty straight forward, it’s all composed of primitive object with booles to cut away certain parts. I wasn’t to sure of the color since the comic is black and white so I went for the shiny reflective feel.
The hardest part was the chain, in the comics it’s just a mass of lines that look like a chain but is more just a black shape. I made the chain links and put it helix with the cloner, I believe the duplicate on spline would off set 90 degrees perfectly but the cloner gave me more flexibility. I found that the sync option allow the random effector for almost near perfect equal rotation on each item.
The chain kills the render time, not to bad overall(5 mins) but it does push my computer near the magical number of 90 degrees Celsius for instant shut down(at least if I try to do other stuff while rendering).
I think as far as modeling this hammer it’s pretty much done for what I need and more. I’ll probably tweak it a bit and post on my DA page and here when it’s finished as an extra post/
Avatar the Last Airbender is on of my favorite animated shows, and although the series has been done for a number of years now, they have been producing comics about what happened after the series was over. I have personally been really enjoying these giving us fans a look at what happened to our favorite character as they get older and what helps shapes the world that we see in Legend of Korra.
