Dragon Bait and Animate

One of the things I really wanted in Cure was a moving title, something really simple but abstract enough to fit in with the rest of the film. I had a plan based on an older concept piece of lines coming away from the title. The font I used is Appendix from Da Font which is 100% free for use. So I typed out Cure in Photoshop and kept it as a smart object. I then added in different lines that I animated using the transform function in Photoshop and the video animation window.  I then saved out the frames as individual PNG files with transparency. The PNGs were loaded into Unity and set as Sprites so that I could use them in the Canvas layer of the UI. I selected all of the images and dragged them into the Canvas which automatically created a frame animation for me. I then edited this animation to add a fade in and fade out at the beginning and end.

With the Beano project almost finished (just tidying up some loose ends and sorting through sounds) I realised I hadn't uploaded the final kitchen scene here. The kitchen was modelled in Maya and rendered with Maya Software using a Toon Shader with a little noise to help break up the flatness. I threw in a couple of little 'Easter Eggs' that will probably go unnoticed in the background. The 2D Art of Ping and Noodle belongs to Anna Nilson Axenstig

So far the Beano Project seems to be going quite well. We've set up a little production line where Anna would do the sketches for Ping and Noodle, Tao would line them and separate their layers and I would colour and export as transparent PNG files. This way we can layer up the images in Adobe After Effects and animate each layer individually if we need to. This is how I've set myself up in Photoshop to colour the images: I had also done a couple of little experiments in After Effects to see how Noodle might animate but since then Anna has done some nicer animations! I also messed with the colour in the kitchen scene and so I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to tidy it up for the background renders.

I realise I've been pretty quiet on here but I have been working away at the 3D kitchen scene for Ping and Noodle over the last week. There still needs to be some colour tweaks because the character won't quite fit in with it just yet but I think it's mostly pulling down the saturation. Right now I have 3 light sources in the scene for the 2 windows and the door but I might swap a window out and add in a light at the microwave or the oven as a colour light but we'll see how it all comes together. At least now, if we're unhappy with something we don't completely have to re-draw it, we can just make a few tweaks and re-render.  In other news I looked at pulling a sketch Anna had done of Noodle into Photoshop and tidying it up. Then I took it into After Effects and tried out the Puppet Warp tool to animate it a little. It took longer than I thought but most of it was a learning experience more than anything. If we have the right character art we...