This 4-minute movie tells a story about an unpopular guy at work:
I hope you enjoy it.
The workflow was like this:
- Head and body are separate skeletons, rigged in Spine, for the 3 characters.
- A web-based tool I wrote is used to author and programmatically control the facial animation, outputting a png sequence of frames for the head.
- Body animations were made in Spine, synced to the audio track. These were exported to png sequences.
- Various PNG sequences imported into After Effects and composited there.
On this project I learned about Spine's ability to animate multiple skeletons together. I think the tool wasn't designed foremost for authoring scenes like this, but it works quite well. Arguably, I would have been better off to comp everything inside of Spine, but there are a small number of things for my project that I can't accomplish in Spine or just work better inside AE.
I imagine it looks a little crude by pro standards. I'm committed to a kind of South Parkian ideal of building a factory to turn out animation fast. So many of the refinements other people would aim for just aren't important to me.
-Erik
