Major: More Animation and Blocked out Scenes

This is a render of my character, without the toon lines, placed against one of my 2D backgrounds. I will move the star to the middle of the shot, and have it end on a red background. I plan to use the 2D animations to change the colour of my scene a few times.

This video shows some more of the animation I have done, as well as some more rough poses for the later part of my film. It also has a some of my 2D animated backgrounds, some of which are just placeholders to show when I will have one.

I have done some more work on the earlier scenes since I added the playblasts to this composition, and I will make an update to show this.

Major: Turnaround Update + Face Ref

I have created an updated turnaround for my character, with a different pose and with the face now posed.

I am also posting the videos I took as reference for lip syncing purposes, as I did not include them in my previous reference post.

Major: More Animation + Fire

This is part of my second scene. I blocked out the body animation before adding the fire. This helped me to see see where best to put the flames.

I have used planes with blendshapes to make each flame. I wanted to be able to stick these flames to parts of my character, and have them distort to point upwards when my character moves.

I did some tests with a cube, using lattice deformers with a cluster aim constrained to a locator above the scene. It took me a few tries to get the right set up of constraints and settings on the various parts of this, but I was able to get it working on individual flames and groups of flames.

 I made a set of shapes to animate to create a flickering for the flame and added the deformers to the set up.

I parented each flame to a locator and used parent constraints to attach the locators to the characters joints. I used the scale of the locators to make the flames appear and disappear.

I used an aim constraint on each cluster to point it to another locator, which I was able to keep above the scene, and animate as needed.

This is the result.

I may try something else to keep the flames facing the camera, but this is pretty close to what I want.