felixcolgrave
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How To Wrap Grandmother in a Cozy Blanket
🕑 Added 2024-08-14 04:21:39 +0000 UTCHave you ever had a 2D grandmother you needed to swaddle in a blanket, but your redrawn blanket wasn't detailed and cozy enough? Same!
I tried out a solution to "the grandmother problem" here, and it probably wasn't that efficient, but I don't need to draw this character very much so it doesn't matter.
It's similar to this test I did a while back, only here I'm distorting a fabric pattern in 2D instead of 3D. Also this isn't a test this time, this is part of the rat movie!
Comments
Felix Colgrave
Thank you! I need to get better at recording my work- with these time lapses I don't always think to start screen recording until I'm halfway through a process- especially since at the beginning I'm usually messing around and trying different stuff that doesn't end up working. That's why you never see me START painting the blanket in this video!
Felix Colgrave
Thank you! It gives me a practice run doing the sound design for the actual scene. For instance I worked out the chair/clock sound effects for this video, and now I've copy+pasted them into the real thing.
Felix Colgrave
That would certainly be nice! The individual stitches will be pretty small on screen and it's probably more effort than this character warrants- however, I'm yet to do the final compositing on her. At that stage, I can play around with things like, say, putting a distortion effect on the the blanket mask to make the edges appear slightly 'bumpy', which could help subtly imply a woven edge. Definitely worth trying!
Felix Colgrave
Really good question! Real texture mapping is determining how a texture sits on a 𝙨𝙪𝙧𝙛𝙖𝙘𝙚. But with a redrawn shape, like this old woman's torso, there isn't a surface to attach that information to! There's only a silhouette, and each silhouette is a new drawing, so the software isn't even keeping track of which edges correspond to one another between frames. Tools like camera tracking can extrapolate motion from footage and wrap something around it- which works fine with live action, but with redrawn animation, the silhouette is still the only data to grab onto. The grid I drew wouldn't be enough to automate the process. To avoid this situation I could've just made the torso a different way like in 3D. But, if I had heaps more redrawn characters wrapped in blankets like this, then yes you're right! I would try to design a pipeline to automate or streamline some of this process, and I'm positive that'd be possible. However there's no out-of-the-box solution in this use case, so it would involve a bunch of trial and error and maybe even custom code/software. And I do love figuring that stuff out! But this blanket animation is only 11 frames long, so even though it's a bit tedious, doing it manually is still probably going to be faster than anything else. These situations happen a lot when you experiment with different techniques!
Lea Fava
Aw man please do more of these 🙏 Such great insight into your process!
John Bonnin
Painstaking: literally taking pains. That's what I love about Felix.
Will Kommor
Shoutout to the mixer brush
Baker Tony
Isn't this just texture mapping? There must be a way to automate it instead of doing it frame by frame like that.
Christopher Rutledge
wow this is brilliant
Christopher Guerra
You score your bts like it's hecking fantasia 👑
Richard Tran
I am screaming crying with you
Ryan Clark
I wonder if you could get more depth around the edges by tracing each stitch as it looks like it turns the edge, giving it a “puffed” look?
Bob Deljanin
The discipline, the execution, the art. You should do this for a living! 😄
