Hi all! New Funny Legs episode is out now! This time I wanted to create a cozy Christmas postcard to boost our holiday spirit this December. 🥳
I’ve spent 3 weeks creating this episode from scratch. The characters are 3D, but the set and props are 95% Grease Pencil.
Let me show you some behind the scenes and tricks that helped me.
☃️ Winter Wonderland
To create a festive winter atmosphere, I wanted to start with a winter landscape. My source of inspiration was one of my favorite paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Hunters in the Snow, 1565. I took its composition and simplified it till I had a few simple shapes: valleys, mountains, and trees. Since Funny Legs tells stories from the life of Bob and Dog, I placed a cute little house far away - and we see Bob coming out from the left (just like the hunters), carrying a giant tree.
☃️ Winter landscape has 21 Grease Pencil layers. Almost everything is animated with the rig: hills, mountains, trees, and the house are all parented to bones. However, golden lines and the road that appear on the hills are animated with the Build Modifier: I could easily control their speed of appearing in Graph Editor.
☃️ Christmas Decorations
The same Build Modifier helped me play with Christmas tree decorations. And talking about them, I used the star on the tree as the center of my next transition between the scenes - and suddenly the star becomes a decoration on a gift box. This box had to jump around (with Dog jumping inside of it), so I made a simple rig. The best part was to rig a Grease Pencil ribbon on the box with the help of the Lattice and Stretch To constraints. Very simple, but it worked like a charm.
100K+ views
After months of hard work, the algorithms have suddenly noticed my Funny Legs project! 😅 A single making-of video with the opening scene from this episode already got 87K views on Instagram. Plus, 26K views on YouTube Shorts. And the numbers are still growing!
This is a breakthrough for me as a solo animator, as I do everything from developing the story and rigs to promotion - all by myself. So, I am sorry if it sounds like I’m bragging, but I am just so excited! 🥳
You can check it out here:
And here’s a new complete behind the scenes video with all my doodles that I use as a storyboard and some more Blender working materials.
Love the Funny Legs series. It's so relatable for pet owners. 😁
Thank you! Oh, I am so happy if it's relatable, that's one of my big goals!
Awesome, congrats on getting lots of views for the first time. Funny Legs deserves it. It is a great project, one with soul and those are hard to come by in an era where there is so much content.
Thank you so much for your support, it means a lot to me!