Hikari's Dilemma - Shot 16 - Thrustin'

After that last shot, I think I've come down with case of traditional animation fever...

There are a couple of closeup shots like this in Hikari's Dilemma (Newgrounds / Vimeo / Youtube). Though I had originally intended on animating them via my usual puppet animation, I figured I should at least attempt some traditional animation here. Very glad I did!

The original frame from the comic was a slim, small frame. Portrait oriented panels don't make for the easiest adaption into widescreen video, but I managed it.

Now, if this were were for puppet animation, I would've converted this shot, cut up into pieces, and prepared to warp and figure out the timing and extremes in After Effects. But, since this was traditional animation... I had to go a different route.

Cyberunique sent me some quick, rough animation of this shot, for me to use as reference / very rough animation.

So I took these rough frames and made my own attempt.

It's... fine. But it reall wasn't resonating with me. I liked parts of it, but other parts seemed off. 

So, after playing around with some timing, drawing my own frames, and spending hours trying to understand the nature of butts, I wound up with this!

Much better, if still pretty rough. Now that I had the bodies in, time for the skirt, since the girls aren't supposed to be fully nude.

I went into this feeling pretty apprehensive, but surprisingly the skirt wasn't horrible! 

Then, all that was left was to do the line art, coloring, and shading! Easy peasy! 

Okay, so, it wasn't that easy... I spent a LOT of time trying to get the line art to look right, and not have ridiculous amounts of line boil. But, in the end, it worked out!

Still, there is something missing... the wetness. That had been pretty easy in the previous shot, so I dove right into drawing the wetness. 

It didn't work out. In fact, I'm not even going to show you that first attempt because of how much I hated it. Thankfully, though, Cyberunique was there to give me some pointers and sketched out some potential wetness design for me. 

Much better, however something still looks off. It took me a while to figure it out, but the wetness lines were just too bright, especially since most of them were in shadow. I tried a couple of different solutions, but eventually settled of giving them a gradient opacity from the top to the bottom.

I'm pretty pleased with the results, and I hope you all are too!

Here's the fully traditionally animated shot in all it's glory!

I was hesitant going into this. but in the end I'm pretty happy with the result! I'm also well into the animation of the next closeup, which I'm also doing traditionally. I think I'll post some WIPs of that this coming week, so look forward to that!