Ahhh the Christmas season!
While there’s still only rain splashing at my window and the vibes are degraded by another wave of infections shutting down schools and activities, I can’t help but be in a cheerful mood today ^v^
Since November started, I’ve dedicated all my time to school projects and so far, I’ve done a good amount of progress. Most animation so far is finished, mainly writing and a bit of designing remain. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s still enough to keep me going at the usual pace, even though I have finally found inspiration to do at least one private project.
Some of these projects are a tad daunting and the challenge puts me under pressure, but I guess that’s just the way it is and my task is to overcome those obstacles.
Given how much it is I have to do, there really wasn’t much time to think about anything personal. I’ve adopted the mindset I came out of October with and abandoned the plans I had for the late year, which is a shame, I don’t want to understate it, but they can be recapitulated next year, I just have to take the opportunity.
But let’s talk about what I DID this month.
My daily work-schedule had to be severely split, often resulting in one project in the morning and another in the evening. Animation was usually kept in the latter; I produced scene after scene of sketches to be later refined to more quality frames. The whole ordeal won’t be finished until next year though but I still have something else I’m working on that’s presentable very soon. My usual working habit is to focus on one project at a time but this way of separation worked well and I’ve become more flexible in that regard.
Firstly, I have been working on Zalumnee’s model, which took a good 3 weeks to finish. There have been so many steps involved, that I can’t remember all of them. The most fun part was modelling, probably. It’s actually more fun than sculpting and it smoothed out the edges I had with it in the first place.
Nothing beats seeing your character come to life though, I hope that feeling will never go away ^v^
As of now, I don’t have any plans for another model or what to do with this one but what I’d do if I had to re-approach this would be to design the 2D ref sheet with straight ankles, as it messed around with my rigging quite a bit, which turned out to be the most troublesome part about this whole process probably (although I admit, I was short of hairs to pull a couple of times), blender is the best software I know but it is and stays a brainfuck-factory for me 😀
So, where do I see this software being used by me in the future? 3D animation still is a pretty rough sector and 2D – as of now – gives me a more direct approach to the look of it. Organic shapes still take very long to model and don’t necessarily look as good as in 2D so I’ll mainly use Blender as a complement for my lack of perspective skills and hard-surfaced modelling for… well hard-surface objects that I can’t get down as accurately. But for now, I’ll only theorize about its uses it has in my style. After this elaborate project, I went over to do a 2D animation, which I will have finished shortly (if it goes as planned). And yet there is a 2D animation I wanna do with Zalu, but I want to do it proper, animate her to a sound file, I just haven’t found one that would be fitting her character…
Ah, let’s see if I can keep up my productiveness with school and squeeze in a little something to close-up the year. The week of Christmas to New Year’s Eve is reserved to only rest and relaxation with family and there’s no way I’ll be told out of it. 😛
So, the next one will be an annual reflection again, I always love to do those but it might come a little bit later this time.
Anyway, enjoy the winter days and have a lovely time until we meet again <3
~Souvillaine