- Hi everyone, Pierrick from P2design.
In this video I will
show you how I've made
this still frame from my latest animation.
(calming music)
Since I've done this animation
for my latest tutorial,
I've received a lot of positive feedback
regarding the still
frame during the impact.
(whip whooshing)
As you have probably guessed,
it's mainly and deeply influenced
by the Spider-verse movie.
While I absolutely don't
pretend that I get such quality
in such a short time, I
will give you a few tips
on how I've built it.
So I will just like one or
two minutes on the animation
and then we'll go onto
seeing how I've built
this current frame, let's get started.
One of the big mistakes I've made
before I start animating
this is not to watch
some references of whip attacks.
So during the blocking stage,
I've posed my character
as if he was going to
strike with a sword or so.
But you need quite of a
slow and smooth movement
to bring back the whip
before striking with it,
and I was missing this, so I fixed this
after watching some references.
The second thing is that
I've made my whole animation
before staging, meaning that
I first animated the character
and then I set up the camera.
So I guess this is because
I mainly animate for games,
so I don't really focus
and care about camera.
But I should have made
a last pass of polishing
on my animation after the staging.
So on the first pose,
we can see that we have
a lot of empty space around our character,
which made its silhouette very readable,
so that's a good point.
Then I have this subtle anticipation,
because he's raising something
that is pretty light.
And this anticipation goes
into a second anticipation
before the strike, where the
line of action is pretty clear.
Then I have a old position
to let the whip fall
into the next small anticipation.
In here you can see that the right arm
is not as readable as
before, so that's a mistake.
From there I've created
an extreme anticipation
on only two frames.
The idea is to make this pose
contrasting with the next one.
So I really like to use this kind of
super short anticipation,
and very extreme,
it really helps to read.
And you can see that both
curve and line of action
are contrasted or opposed,
one to each other.
So it bring more power into the motion
and more readability, which is good.
And then we go to our impact frame.
And thankfully, here
again, the line of action
was pretty clean, even if
I didn't made the layout
or the camera framing before.
The only thing I would have fixed
is to make the right arm
a little further forward
so that it's more
aligned with the back arm
and the silhouette is more
readable, something like this.
So now, let's jump into the still frame.
For the base lighting of the scene,
I wanted to have strong rim lights,
but I didn't want them to
cast shadows onto the ground
or to be seen on the ground.
So I've used spotlight and I've made sure
that the cone shape didn't
clip with the ground.
From there I've slightly
improved the shading
of my character by using a fresnel node
driving a color ramp to put
highlights in the base color
of the character.
I've been using Eevee to
render the whole frame
and the whole animation.
First thing was to change
the background color
to something more vibrant.
And that was matching
the color of the body
of the character.
Plugged into a color ramp set to constant
to get this comic shading
onto the character.
I've then copy and pasted the nodes
onto the red material to
get the same kind of effect.
Note that I keep the black
color near the bright colors,
so that it creates some
kind of natural outline.
From there I've starting
burning depth into the scene.
So I've mainly been using simple planes
that I've cut using the knife
tool or using simple bevels.
What I like about those simple planes
is that they are already UV unwrap
and it's really easy to play
with the UV coordinates.
I've mixed a simple gradient
texture with a noise texture
to get those kind of tears apart clouds.
I've then mixed it with a position node
to make sure that they
don't clip with the ground.
So anything with value
on the z-axis under zero
was getting transparent.
All the shaders but the
character are using alpha blend
as a mode here, so that I can mix
emission with transparency,
there is no defuse or stuff like this.
Then I've started adding
a few black lines.
So, I'm still using planes.
I'm scaling them in object mode
so that it's easy for me to rotate them
by keeping their local coordinates.
The plan is to mix orangey-reddish colors,
very bright and intense and saturated,
with black lines to bring
that dynamism to the picture.
I'm also using a very short focal line
so that I got a wide angle.
To make the dot pattern,
I've been on Google
and I've typed dot pattern,
if that makes sense,
because I wanted to replace the shadow
casted by the character
by a dot pattern shadow,
so I've used a dot
pattern I find on Google
and imported it in my node.
I've also used the shader to RGB node
to isolate the shadow of the character
so that the dot pattern only appears here
and it mixes a black emission shader
with a transparent shader.
Since the shadow is used as a mask,
if I remove everything
you can see the pattern
on the whole surface.
And when I add an object
that casts shadows,
you can see that the
shadows become this pattern.
I've then added a few planes,
still playing with the
perspective using this dot pattern
mixed with transparency.
To make the impact on the ground,
I've made some kind of bowl shape
using a hemisphere and cutting into half.
And then I've mixed up a gradient texture
with a simple noise texture.
Using the greater than
function allowed me to get
nice and sharp cuts around my smears.
Then I've added a couples of planes
to increase the impact sensation.
Then I've cut a few buildings
silhouette on simple plane
and added to them a simple emission shader
that I've color graded so that it fits
some atmospherical
perspective in the scene.
I've also changed the color of the clouds
because they were too bright.
And I've also added a few black
speed lines sort of things.
Then I've imported the whole
sequence in After Effects
and I've made our special frame to last
for five or six frames.
Then in Photoshop I've
created a bold contour
on my character to make
it pop out of the frame.
I've also created the
text layer in Photoshop.
I could have done it in After Effects,
but I'm used to working Photoshop, so...
Then I felt that the other
sequence wasn't looking that good
so I've added the background
into it and re-rendered it.
Then I've played with the
contrast and luminosity
of the frame by playing with curves.
I've also added a vignette effect
that I have exclude by animating
it from our comics picture.
And finally, I did animate a slight
chromatic aberration effect
inside of the picture,
because they were using it in the movie
to replace blur effect.
So I thought that will be nice to add it.
So it's very subtle in the video,
I don't think anyone has seen it,
but now that you know it,
maybe you will spot it.
Once I was done with all
those color shenanigans,
I've been on the internet
to fish some free sounds
and I've mixed them up inside of Audition
and I was done with the animation.
(sirens wailing)
(whip whooshing)
This is the end of this video.
If you like my content don't
forget to like and subscribe,
this helps a lot, and
share it with your friends.
If you want to see the whole time lapse,
I've posted it in a previous video.
In the meantime, take care,
I'll see you in the next one.
(ominous music)
