Yesterday I animated Cthulhu’s tentacle. My goal in this shot is to direct the audience’s attention to the upper right hand corner because the next shot had a person drowning in that corner of the frame. My first several passes at the animation were thrown out because I was over animating the tentacle spiraling open. The shot is only a little over a second in length so all that movement made the tentacle more of a whip than a graceful flowing movement.
I don’t plan to animate any of the other tentacles. The parallax effect worked really good on the first pass so I will duplicate all the settings I used. The shot feels so three dimensional that it feels like the earth is spinning. I want ti keep that sensation.
The only other animation added was a blink. In the original illustration I had Cthulhu looking at the people screaming in the foreground. Because of the 1920 by 1080 aspect ration those figures are out of frame. I decided instead to have Cthulhu looking at the moving oxygen canister. A quick blink will add life.
Today I need to paint the blink and composite the elements together. I plan to make Cthulhu 3D on a separate pass with a green screen and then composite over a 3D earth. That is so I can sandwich the animation between those layers so that the painted edge of the tentacle doesn’t bubble unnaturally. I will have a similar issue with the eye blink. I will need to smooth the animation paint into the existing character paint as best I can. There are some smearing effects in Callipeg which should be able to do the job. If not I may have to import those paintings into Procreate to use the brushed I actually used to create the illustration.