Looping Gif - Animated Doggo

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

A looping gif is a video that has the same first frame and the last one basically making it all look like it never ends.
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Project Goal
The goal of this project was to think of an idea that can loop forever confusing viewers where the end is. Conclusion there is no end. My personal goal includes showing off my Cinema 4d skills and rotoscope in photoshop.

Main Animated frame

Process

Storyboard for dog

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 food is 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 and bouncy!

After my idea is done, I start modelling 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 modelled with a capsule and bend deformer features.
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Thinking in the style,  I tried adding fur to him but I didn’t like the style and I felt a clayish style was fitting.

Character edited in green backgroundOriginal Client fileOriginal Client file
Final Product

I begin animating the dog in C4D while animating the tantrum. The arms moving looked slow and didn’t show that he meant business when there is no more food. So I changed it and added a smear effect in 3D (duplicated his arms by 4 times) now he is showing he really is flailing and moving his arms!

For the bowl I used the cinema 4D dynamics and cloned the food. 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 all even making it look unrealistic.)

Edits being made in After Effects

When I bring all the models into one project to render, I encounter a big problem. The render time was taking a whole day and that is not good. So I started looking into the render options to make the animation render fast but not to lose quality! In the end I settled by saving the bowl and dog food png sequence as an alpha channel (transparent layer) and the render took just 10 minutes. The plan was to bring it all together in After Effects and it saved me a lot of time.

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.

Edits being made in After Effects
Final Product

The animation looks good and everything is in place, except some extra effects I plan to add and creating this file 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 add this.

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

Edits being made in After Effects

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