Big Animation Updates

Here's the first official look at how "Black Magic" will look when completed.  This background is borrowed from Fire and Ice (1983) because my own painted backgrounds are done yet, so this is a production preview and not a final frame.

First thing you'll probably have noticed, this isn't a 3d animation anymore. I've been silent on here for a few weeks because I was needed to make sure the switch from 3d to 2d was going to work. After some basic tests and changing my workspace over to allow me to draw more I'm happy to say it's not only working, but it's pretty cool. Two major issues finally pushed me to switched from using Maya to render out 3d animation to drawing it myself in the traditional way.

Maya started giving me a lot of problems. I'm still essentially a beginner and I've been trying to build a complex set of characters and scenes. Once I started adding in the dynamics simulations for hair, breasts, and clothing (the main reason I wanted to switch to Maya in the first place) it began crashing regularly. Maya is great for those kinds of things so I'm certain it's something I'm doing wrong, and I can't really spend more time trying to fix it. Building an animation this complex from the ground up is currently more ambitious than I can manage.

The good news is that having built everything I need, I have REALLY useful reference for the hand drawn animation. I'm rotoscoping from what I made in Maya, largely. So preproduction didn't quite end up doing the way that I expected but was still very much a necessary step.

The second part is largely financial. I've been open on here for 6 months now and only met my baseline income goal for one of those months. I was already operating at a loss before then, so in June I finally caved and took a full-time job to cover my bills. This project is now effectively a paid hobby. I've had to reduce down to two days a week working on it. I don't blame anyone for the numbers dipping as low as they have, the project as taken too long already and it's hard to keep putting money into a project with few updates and slow progress. And that's fine. But if I'm doing this below budget I want it to be fun, and Maya was becoming a headache beyond reason.

I had considered doing it as a hand drawn animation right from the start, because I've wanted to try traditional work for ages. That's the kind of work I loved growing up and making something that feels kind of life it would be a really cool direction, so that's where things are going! :) I used the background shot from Fire and Ice as mock-up for the final look because that film captures the essence of what I want to do. It's not perfect, and it's not the best animation of all time, but it's a cool, raw style that I totally dig.

I don't know yet if I'll keep going with traditional work after this or go back and give Maya another shot. I've honestly considered throwing in the towel if this isn't a solid hit. Animation takes vastly more time and effort than comics and, lately, doesn't even pay as well. Currently, I plan to keep doing what I do. The only big change is that I'm going to start putting the focus back on what I want to make and see.

There we have it! Okay then, you guys are officially up to speed. Thanks for all your support and sorry this isn't done yet!