Happy Robot Day Everyone and Happy Summer Fest!

For Robot Day this year, I finish Robot New Year's a little toon started back in late 2021:

Besides the info in it's description about applying stuff from class I wanted to talk a bit more about some reflections and what's going to happen moving forward.

This took a long time since I was weaving in between robotics courses and large school projects to get this done, and I'm just happy to have something out there y'know?

And thank you to everyone who has reviewed it, given me suggestions, and those who I owe high-fives to! The feedback has been amazingly helpful and I'm already starting to implement what I learned from this project to work on future ones. I think as I said earlier this year in a news post, this was kind of a precursor project to larger ones to get the idea of the entire process again, and I'm got the itch to animate again, even as classes for school are starting back up. And kind of a funny reminder: Yup! I'm a robotics engineering student who draws/animates robots :)

I also learned that OpenToonz, which Robot New Year's was made entirely in, is not robust enough for my needs. During my work for the Summerfest opening, I did one of my shots in OpenToonz, and the other with Blender's Grease Pencil. OpenToonz was for shot 19, and it good, but limiting in the amount of colored lines I could use on one layer for lining (it would slow down both my laptop and workstation when trying to erase).

Grease Pencil ran smoother on both of my computers, and even was less demanding on my laptop. So I'm going to be moving to Grease Pencil for now. Switching back and forth between edit and draw mode is a bit of a pain, and not being able to erase fills was also a tad annoying, but that's only after about a month of work with it. I'll get better as I go along.

And Happy Summer Fest! As I mentioned a tad earlier I helped in the Summerfest Opening and all the animators did an amazing job! Check it out!

@TheExtreamH annoyed @Syrupmasterz and I to join, so we did and kept up with each other during production. The other animators were also such a pleasure to talk and worth with :)

@RobC3 and I had to coordinate the colors and outfits for Steve and Captain, and they did and amazing job making the final edits to balance the contrast on the outfits.

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In the meantime, I'm getting back to work on things, and I got to meet a lot of ya'll at Too Many Games. I wanted to do a post about that, but er, to say the least, it was awesome to meet you all! Some of you again, and it was awesome to hear about all the projects you all are up to :) I love all of you and the work you all are doing is amazing. Ya'll mean the world to me <3

Take care and Happy Robot Day!

Best,

-TheDyingSun