Pixel Studies

[Joe]

I'd like to open up a thread for my own general studies. There's so much knowledge in this forum the only way I'm going to soak it up is through practice.
There were many activites I was too young and inexperienced to meaningfully participate in at the time they were had, so one I would like to start with now is Smile Part 2.



I worked on a fresh take of the current batch, adding some new expressions, removing some.
In some cases the ideas were so good or obvious I could do little but improve upon them, in others I had a better idea.
If you could weigh in on readability it'd be appreciated.

[BlackTerror]

You missed the inner antialiasing on the devil -- the outline is still being antialiased towards yellow.

[Joe]

Following AI's advice I separated the parchment from the roof edge.
Still flexible at this point, but it will be animated. Any compositional faults let me know.





The reindeer will be playing on the roof while Santa reads. This is my first draft at an alternating jump.

[IrresponsibleFreelancer]

For the reindeer i can see a bit of an odd tangent where it appears as if the reindeer are dancing on the parchment itself.  The roofs top should not be so close to the top line of the parchment.  Another thing that i noticed that may not bother you but i think would make the pictrure better if possible is that the moon as the light source is having absolutely no effect on the scene except on santa, if you have enough space with the pixels i recommend trying to figure something out with some rim lighting on the buildings and other aspects.  Another very small detail that may also not make a difference is the chimney closest to us where we can see two planes of it, due to the fact that no end to the chimney is in sight it looks unreasonably tall and unending.  Im assuming that it is still a wip but still i think the background could use a lot more subtle details with low contrast besides the reindeer.  Without those things it looks great.   

About the reindeer something seems slightly off.  They seem to freeze for a frame to long in the air or stay in the air a frame to long.  Its barely noticable but you can kind of feel it.

[Joe]

Yes, definitely needed more background, and I can't believe I didn't have green this whole time.
Chimney didn't really bother me. I think it's too short now.
The idea is to have the reindeer obscured by Santa's list, then when he notices and looks up they'll stop playing.

[Joe]

Shifted the crop so we can see more of the hood.
How did noone point out the lack of xmas lights all this time?
Pro animators: how in the fuck do you do this? I need reindeer at 8 frames, xmas lights at 4, chimney smoke at ?? and Santa too. Since the reindeer will stop and interact with Santa, the frame count only needs to be divisible by 4.
But my question is about workflow. Once I have 30 frames, if I want to tweak something static I have to copy/paste it 29 times, correct?
So the proper workflow is to get all the elements as they should be, animate the different layers... tweak the timing and then polish? Never really done something of this scope before.