Looping Gif - Animated Doggo

Storyboard Modelling Animation Problems Conclusion

Apps used

Role
• Create a storyboard and have the first frame be the same as the last.
• Make it loop seamlessly.

A looping gif is a video that has the same first frame and last creating a looping effect that never ends.
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Project Goal
The goal of this project was to think of an idea that can loop forever. My personal goal includes showing off my Cinema 4D skills and rotoscope in Photoshop.

STORYBOARD

I started by making my storyboard. My idea was to have a dog be happy with his food and start eating it. As soon as the food runs out he throws a tantrum and then out of nowhere, his food is filled up. When designing the Dog I thought of simple shapes like a big circle and just blob arms and legs making the animation easy, bouncy and most importantly, fun!

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Modelling

After my idea is done, I start modeling the Dog, the food kibble and the bowl in C4D. I use a combination of subdivision surfaces for his mouth to stick perfectly to his head. The mouth was modeled with a capsule and bend deformer features.

Thinking in regards to the style, I tried adding fur to him but I didn’t like that style and felt a clayish style was more fitting for what I had envisioned.

Animation

I begin animating the dog in C4D starting with his tantrum. The waving arms looked slow and lacked emphasis on the displeasure due to lack of food, so I sped it up and applied a smear effect in 3D by doubling his arms. He is now really flailing and moving his arms in frustration!

Problems

I encountered a significant problem early on... HOW IS THE FOOD GOING TO COME?Luckily by messing around and looking for solutions, I came across Cinema 4D Dynamics and proceeded to clone the food. I placed the food into a cone to emulate physics for the food to funnel down into a single spot! Cinema 4D offers an easy way to do this type of animation and this was very fast to animate (without the floating cone, which is offscreen, the food would have fallen more evenly making it look unrealistic).

When I brought all the models into one project to render, I encountered a big problem. The render time was taking an entire day which is less than desirable, so I started looking into the render options to hopefully make the animation render significantly faster without compromising quality! The plan was to bring it all together in After Effects and that ended up saving me a lot of time. I saved the bowl and dog food png sequence as an alpha channel (transparent layer) and subsequently knocked the render time down to just under 10 minutes!

After bringing it to After Effects I bring the dog food bowl into the scene on top of the dog layer and start adding some shadows to the bowl to not make it look out of place. I also add some colour correction to the composition to make it brighter and nicer.

Conclusion

The animation looks good and everything is in place, except for some additional effects I plan to add. I want to turn this animation into a GIF so I open the mp4 file in photoshop and start adding some effects such as the tears when he throws the tantrum, the added lines to the smear, and the munch effect for when he is eating the food. I use a brush and create a drawing layer in photoshop to achieve this effect.

Finally, I export it as a gif with 128 dither in Photoshop. This dog will never stop eating!