A Blur of creating a scene, animating, and rigging

This is a large LARGE update on my project so far. 

Didn't feel the need to update much since, well I got lazy. I did the usual studying and learning but most of the 3 days I haven't posted anything. I have been working on how the scene will play out as well as accumulating assets (free ones which unfortunately costs time to make work). The biggest work so far I've made on the project was creating the basis for an animation. 

Let's start with the videos I've watched so far. (It was a lot especially since everything was pretty new.)

https://youtu.be/aHG148jiEi4?feature=shared This video served as a reference for ideas. This literally gave me the idea of creating an animation instead of animating the camera alone. AND MAN, it has been a lot of fun messing around with everything. I'll dive in after about my whole new goal and animation that has been developing in my mind for 3 days now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbzBt60dhY8\ Taught me to use the asset browser for blender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBJp82tlR3M Basic refresher for me on how to even animate in blender. Not so much as a tutorial but an overview about the tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoVomEOKbc This video gave me another idea for the animation. Use frames instead of all interpolation. This in turn made the animation take much longer but gave me a lot of control over how I want it to look. This came at a downside of the amount of time to animate, so I'm going to look deeper in optimizing this whole process and automating to reduce the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLj6Y5OTnjI Haven't implemented this in yet, but it could come into use later for automating the inbetweens.

https://github.com/EatTheFuture/camera_shakify Cool plugin for camera shakes!!!

https://x.com/ix_lemon/status/1672630930358370304 Possible tutorial to use in the future to create this pop out look. Could be used for impact frames or freeze frames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-sF_1FgpJw One of the most important videos I've watched to begin to understand how to even animate, especially the workflow and methodology in placing keyframes with proper timings and relations to other frames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UXjRCORV44 A helpful video that talks more in detail about the timing and spacing of keyframes and how it impacts the motion. The closer another frame is to another, it increases the momentum of feeling,

https://github.com/iBrushC/animextras Onion skinning application I found! Very useful in creating the inbetweens of keyframes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIdeGmN__Pw Learning more as a reference to how I want to add smears.

https://youtu.be/yhGjCzxJV3E?feature=shared It is a long video, but it definitely opened my eyes up to how shading could be made. If I ever want to make a shader from scratch after I understand how the system works, I will follow everything possible to make it happen.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHTCMLF-iraIQxffTaCBIQIaIT5wybWAb A helpful bunch of videos about the exact same thing as above, this time in blender. Its very cool but as of right now, completely out of my skillset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff448sh1qsM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtetvOEcZt8 Breakdown of how 2D has evolved in the 3D space. Very cool video talking about the various effects in modern animatics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCplB3zvQks&list=PLqh6cWQm2zLzhEiT8oeEI47y3Nk7dskeT A potential way for me to implement cell shading. Best video I've watched so far in detailing how everything works.

MY NEW GOAL

So, what started out as just a pose and snapping with a background, quickly derailed. Thanks to me getting new ideas to push my skills. Currently, I've been working nonstop in a lot of different departments since creating an animation vs just a picture, involves a lot of different moving parts.

The background, the foreground, the lighting, camera movement, the actual animation, proper rigging of the characters, storyboarding.

So far with 3 days, I've only managed to animate 1 of 3 scenes so far, source some assets for the scene, rigged up chat noir, learned a bunch of theoretical stuff that may or may not be applied to the current project. If I got bored with one aspect, I jumped to another part of the pipeline. Is it efficient? Don't know, but it is slow. Anyways, let's first start with the general storyboard.

It's a simple short animation hopefully less than 10 seconds. The whole animation will take place on a rooftop with a city skyline as the background and a large billboard with Adrien's face on it.

The lighting

The storyboard is as follows with 3 scenes.

1st Scene: Ladybug is staring at an Adrien billboard while Chat Noir starts up the camera (oblivious to the fact that Ladybug was staring lovestruck at the billboard but because he wanted to do something he found on the internet.), Chat Noir calls out to Ladybug to pose, Ladybug turns around and sees a camera realizing its recording and lashes out thinking that Chat Noir was recording her stare at the billboard.

2nd Scene: Camera view is on the floor or on a ledge and shows Ladybug and Chat Noir with their backs turned to the camera with a faint blue light in front of them, Chat is showing Ladybug what he wanted to do, Ladybug reluctantly accepts as a sort of apology for wacking him without asking what he was doing

3rd Scene: the posing scene with animated background much like ZZZ

There were a lot of modification to the general storyline as I got more and more ambitious. At first, I just wanted to transform one pose into the final one and call it a day. Then I was like, what if I give more life to the characters and animate around a small story? After a couple of iterations, the storyboard was finally complete with what I had in mind.

Progress
I've finished animating the first scene with Ladybug, not with Chat Noir however since I've only just rigged up the model before getting bored and wanting to construct the scene. Anyways, here are some screenshots of the process.

Side note: MAKE SURE THE ARMATURE HAS A ROOT BONE!!!! I DIDN'T AND THE MODEL BEHAVED UNEXPECTEDLY EXPECIALLY IF THE MODEL MOVES AROUND!!!!

At this point, I had a lot of progress on the animation that had to be reset because of the root bone. So... yeah, nothing ever goes the correct way the first time, not to much to worry about, just cry about.

Took this as a reference and made it into a pose. The beginning one

Unused animation that I scrapped? Not sure, might still use it.

Onion skinning, creating the animation. The addon is really useful since I wasn't using interpolation for the animation. I was actively fighting the Blender the whole time in order to emulate 2D.

Chat Noir rigging also complete.

3D assets I'm collecting to use in the scene.

FUTURE

So from all of this so far, I wasn't the most productive since I kept getting distracted with other things, but honestly its slowly comming together. This is the most ambitious project I've done in blender so far, and because of it, I'm learning a lot. I know the end result will be mediocre to the vision in my head, but I can't help but get excited with the final animation. There's no doubt in my mind that I'll get better with time, its just well, a matter of time, and that time isn't now.

Future things to learn: assembly of the scene, shader implementation for materials to make it more cartoony?, use of NLA (Idk what it is but it seems really important for animation and repeating it.)