“In your darkest hour, in the blackest night... think of me... and I will be with you.” You’ve gotten an SSR drop! Lucky you!
I’m going to show the steps I took to make this below!
Tools used: Clip Studio Paint, Live2D, Adobe After Effects
I started out with a general idea of my WoL, Ariksar, holding Eleos behind his back. This is a glam I put him in often for DRK. I was generally happy with this sketch and ended up painting over it for his main body.
Below is a colour rough for how the lighting should be rendered. I needed to work with a lot of layers to be able to rig this in Live2D, so colouring each part to match the overall look was going to be difficult without a colour guide for me to follow.
I redid the line art in their separated layers and painted them in according to my colour guide. Below is the finished rendered piece! It is separated into 33 individual parts (excluding the bg and front light beam and effects)
Moving onto Live2D, I slowly rig each part to give me room and flexibility during the animation stage. I only rig what is necessary for the gesture I intend to make him do to save time and effort. There is a total of 29 parameters set up.
Below is the screenshot of the animation mode in Live2D, where I move the parameters around and keyframe them (as you would in other programs like After Effects) to complete the movement. I don’t use the parameters to the extremes that I rigged them in as it looks unnatural in movement if I do, sometimes the rig has to count for anticipation, squish/stretch, and exaggeration. This animation didn't require as much so it was fairly simple.
I rendered the animation out in MOV (transparent alpha), so that I could import it into After Effects where I added volumetric dust, particle effects, text, noise, chromatic aberration, etc. to complete the whole look. I exported the original background, light beam and glow from my rendered illustration earlier + gave them some tweaks so that it is more cohesive.
And we’re done! Hope this gives some insight to my workflow ^^ I originally made this just so that I have a moving wallpaper for my phone haha
