Sentinels
Sentinels are a set of profile pictures which were airdropped to holders of Goblin Laboratory NFTs.
The artwork is great and lends itself to 2D animation, for this piece I wanted to experiment with a new technique to me - using the liquify effect to simulate 3D movement.
The Gif.
Before & After
The Compositing Steps.
The head movement is achieved by gradually morphing the face using the liquify effect in After Effects. Simply put, you drag the facial features to mimic what would happen if the head was to turn towards the screen - for this movement where the character looks towards the camera the characters right eye needs to move to their right, the back of the head needs to be moved inwards, effectively shrinking it - this mimics the perspective change where less of the head would be visible as it has moved behind the face.
Animating the Eyes.
I wanted to animate the eyes moving and blinking along with the head turning, the actual eye movements jump in a couple of frames with the blink starting just before the eyes begin to move - mimicking how our eyes actually behave. The eyeball, iris and eyelids all need to be isolated and painted back in to allow for the movement animation.
Animating the Facemask.
I wanted to feature the slits on the facemask opening, releasing smoke and embers. The smoke is comprised of around 10 different elements, the first pieces are fast smoke pistons placed at the edge of the mask.
Because these are flat images and flat smoke particles the elements cannot interact with one another in 3D, this means that the smoke is either in front of the facemask or behind it when in reality the smoke should come from within the mask and move around it. Because this is not a simulation I used the mask as an alpha matte for some layers of the smoke - you can see the silhouette of the mask in the gif below. Although imperfect it does create a little more volume to the effects and creates a more believable look.
Blood Drip Details.
The main focus for this piece is the character head/face, however the body did seem a little bland compared to the rest of the scene. To add a little more interest I added some blood drips to the spikes. The drips were made by animating and distorting a stroke effect which drops downwards in various lengths. The first version of the drips was rendered in 30FPS and these moved too quickly compared to the rest of the composition and did not fit the aesthetic, to fix this I rendered them at 12FPS which gave a much more natural drip to the motion.
Live Wallpaper.
The background was extended for this live wallpaper to create a 16:9 1080P composition. This can be downloaded for use with wallpaper engine on steam here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2676640949
