Chibimals Animation Test

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Chances are you weren’t aware I have created a youtube channel for Chibmials. Well, I have, and I’m working on doing the animations for it now. Chibimals will be series of short cartoons with a sweeping adventure throughout and a hidden puzzle to discover. It promises to be fun for all ages.

I wanted to throw this little cartoon together specifically to test a few things. First of all, I wanted to see if this animation style I’ve come up with will work, or if it will feel too rough. Basically, you know how “Into the Spiderverse” sometimes animated the characters on 2s or even 3s at times, but the backgrounds always on the 1s? It created some incredible impact that you couldn’t really see, but you could feel. That’s kinda what I did, but pushed to the extreme. basically, I only animated the character poses on the extremes, with no inbetweens, but the camera and other elements still moved on the 1s.

By the way, the audio is intentionally rough. Do not expect the final version to be just me “Boop, boop”ing into a mic and pitch-shifting my voice. I just wasn’t ready for more than that yet and I wanted to get this out.

From this little animation I learned a few things:

  • Rendering takes a long time. I mean, like 2 days, and this was at half resolution!
  • I need to declutter the backgrounds. Less stuff to distract the eye.
  • Need to up my audio game
  • I need an animated intro/outtro. I had one for the kickstarter, but I lost it, and it’s probably time to redo it.

I’ve done animation in the past, but it’s been a while. And this is definitely going to be the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done.

What else do you think I need to learn from this?