Ey up

Okay so a little bit of an annoyed rant but;

The laptop I am using has issues. I have BSoD often which really slows down progress, even if I DO save often. I also don’t trust it with my data. This problem came about during uni so I bought a new laptop - a gaming laptop so it could handle the things I want - but I ended up with a dodgy one. It got to the point where I’d struggle bringing up the task manager and it’d take up to an hour to boot up. I stopped shutting it down entirely. 

Couldn’t do anything because I was living in halls and I NEEDED a laptop for work. I couldn’t just send it off to be fixed. We (me and my brother) tried everything to diagnose the problem. It turned out to be a hardware issue. 

After uni I sent it back to be fixed, and they swapped out the hard drive and the wifi card and gave it back. It declined again proving the issue isn’t the hard drive. It was most likely the motherboard. I sent it off again, and they just formatted it and sent it back. Ofc I was upset over that so I sent it off again and explained in detail why it’s not a hard drive issue, not a virus, please check the motherboard.

They formatted and sent it back.

This was over the course of months. In the end I asked for a refund. 

With the refund I bought parts for a PC to build. Have almost everything except a mouse, keyboard and my own monitor (I salvaged one). I can’t use the PC with just the on-screen keyboard (you NEED a keyboard and mouse with TVP you have no choice) so we hooked my older laptop up to it for remote access. I installed TV Paint, but the lag from the PC, over the internet, to my shitty laptop and into my dodgy tablet is a bit much.

I could connect the tablet directly to the PC but the cables are not long enough and I have no comfortable chair, unless I want to end up with a sore arse for the end of time, it’s not a good idea to be doing work such as this without a comfortable seat. 

We’ve ordered longer cables, a mouse, keyboard and speakers, but it’s just waiting for them to arrive now. I’m sure there will be just as much delay as the PC parts due to the current pandemic.

What I’d do normally, animating, is have the initial sketchy-sketch (that I had already posted) then build a skeleton atop of that to ensure certain things (like head size) don’t change throughout. I wasn’t able to do that because that process absolutely requires an animation software to complete. It can’t be guesswork. It has to be watched in motion. 

Atop that I clean-line from what I’ve already done. More talented animators can animate in one go, but I can’t do that so I’m stuck doing it in a few layers.

What I had to do this time? Well the keyframes were drawn in Paint Tool SAI, transferred to TV Paint where I did my best with in-betweens. Fixing animation isn’t going to be a thing I can do in TVP so I tried it in SAI. Tried. 

After every few frames I’d export and transfer them to the PC and import them into TVP to watch them in motion. More often than now I’d fuck up somewhere and have to go back and fix the new issue. 

Shading and highlighting was done in SAI also. I had to do the base colour, export as a PNG as to lose the layers, then import them back so I can clip shading and highlighting layers ontop of the flattened image. 

It was... a process.

After all was said and done (including a background and foreground shading / highlighting layers), I imported them into TVP to watch the motion

I do NOT recommend animating this way. 

Just don’t. 

Don’t.