Animated 2D Portraits [gif heavy]
polycounter lvl 5
Heya, first time posting! I've been somewhat of a lurker but in an effort to get in contact with other artists who have similar interests, decided to post my work!
Wasn't sure where to put this, but I feel it's more related to 2D art rather then animation. But feel free to move my thread if you disagree.
I'm an Illustrator with a big interest in games and animation, and two years ago I taught myself how to use Live2D Cubism for my indie game project Herald: An Interactive Period Drama. I made about 13 models like this for the game with varying degrees of detail in mobility. I wouldn't call myself an animator but I also animated these.
This is how it looks in game while being controlled by a dialogue system. You can check the game here for those curious: http://store.steampowered.com/app/380810
Here's something I've been working on in my spare time to challenge myself. This one can move from left to right and look up and down. I am also playing with limbs on this one.
Needless to say, I've fallen in love with the program and want to continue working with it! I don't have any experience with Spine, but I think more control over the texture is possible with Live2D Cubism. It's a lot more artist friendly then techniques like putting 2D textures on 3D meshes and achieving the 2.5D look that way.
Unfortunately, since it's a Japanese program, I don't know many western artists who have picked it up yet. But recently Ubisoft released a mobile game called "City of Love: Paris" that uses the same software.
To cut my ramble short, I'd love to get in contact with any artists working on similar detailed 2.5D models professionaly!
Wasn't sure where to put this, but I feel it's more related to 2D art rather then animation. But feel free to move my thread if you disagree.
I'm an Illustrator with a big interest in games and animation, and two years ago I taught myself how to use Live2D Cubism for my indie game project Herald: An Interactive Period Drama. I made about 13 models like this for the game with varying degrees of detail in mobility. I wouldn't call myself an animator but I also animated these.
This is how it looks in game while being controlled by a dialogue system. You can check the game here for those curious: http://store.steampowered.com/app/380810
Here's something I've been working on in my spare time to challenge myself. This one can move from left to right and look up and down. I am also playing with limbs on this one.
Needless to say, I've fallen in love with the program and want to continue working with it! I don't have any experience with Spine, but I think more control over the texture is possible with Live2D Cubism. It's a lot more artist friendly then techniques like putting 2D textures on 3D meshes and achieving the 2.5D look that way.
Unfortunately, since it's a Japanese program, I don't know many western artists who have picked it up yet. But recently Ubisoft released a mobile game called "City of Love: Paris" that uses the same software.
To cut my ramble short, I'd love to get in contact with any artists working on similar detailed 2.5D models professionaly!
Replies
Also thanks for the front page feature
@Dartist You can find tutorials on the Live2D website! But I also advice lots of googling and using google translate on various Japanese tutorials. But they just released a new version of it today so the tutorials might be a bit outdated now.
It wasn't that complicated really but quality tools matter and building a system/workflow from scratch is a lot of work. I was very impressed with the live2d stuff and think you probably made the best choice. That being said I've never directly worked on any of that stuff but Live2d seemed very impressive to me.
@Laughing_Bun Thanks for sharing your experience with 2.5D. I have no experience with Spine, but if I can be blunt, I don't like how stiff the graphics usually keep looking. I really like the 3 dimensionality you can get by deforming the 2D texture. But it seems a lot more robust as an animation software and probably better for sprites and stuff. I have never tried making anything like that using Live2D. But I've also seen stuff from it that looks more like what you'd get with Live2D like this and this.
I'm curious about the workflow in a self made 2.5D setup using 3D software. I've seen talks and posts about it but never that in depth.
And I know all about the difficulties of building that system and workflow, getting Live2D to work in Unity was pretty terrible at the start. We've been very lucky that the company approached us to test and use their new Unity SDK which made it a LOT more workable!
Then you would create a proxy mesh. Basically cut around the alpha then add some extra cuts to form a rough 3d mesh and give that little extra dimension to it. If you follow some sort of a template for laying out your packed textures you can make that process easier on yourself and share assets.
Then we would rig the characters the way you would traditionally in maya. That was the real advantage; getting to use the entire maya animation suite and not mess with a 3rd party software. I am assuming Live 2d has more tools for warping and blending parts together or facial animation. So it really depends on what you want to achieve.
Try building a proxy mesh then mapping your drawings to it and see how it is working for you. Your results are very good but also a lot more subtle than what we were doing.
@dGreenberg Please do check out the game!
@Laughing_Bun Sounds like the best thing about that system is working with a tool that everyone is already familiar with! Building an actual 3D mesh seems like more work then what I have been doing in Live2D. You do create meshes, but it all remains in 2D space so you don't have to worry about anything looking off in 3D space. You can decide how much of a 3D effect you want to create by yourself, as it's just based on how you warp and deform the 2D mesh in different angles.
I did a simple full body character drawing to practice in Live2D Cubism 3 that I will be posting WIP's off over at twitter, for those interested! :] I'll be sure to post the result here as well.
I saw that software a while ago is it translated now ?
@Dood1 Haha I think I can see why, not sure what software they used to animate that movie. I can't really say I liked the style much tho.
@Odow The software is translated, apart from the random Japanese sometimes still found in small sub menus that they seem to have forgotten about :P But it's not an issue.
I wanted to post a new animation I made! :>
Thanks again for all the appreciation!
edit: it really is nice.