Hair Animation

Finished on 2019-03-08.

Animation has been on my head lately. From quite sometime I wanted to try to animate hair. Also Yesterday was Woman's day, and although I'm fairly apathetic to participate with art on international celebrations and whatnot on social networks and the like, I felt the impulse of making something depicting a woman. At first I thought of something perhaps more abstract, then I thought of something more figurative or fine-artsy. But in the end stylized-action-geekery came to fruition. (￣ヘ￣)

I began blocking the pose and adjusting it to my liking.

I tend not to draw with lines, but rather make blobs of pixels and kind of sculpting them with the eraser and brush tools until I have a silhouette I dig. There are some things that I do draw with lines, for instance in this one, the eyes, head and nose... But they're just a few.

Also I often use the selection tool, select a leg or other part I want to adjust and with the transformation tool I make it bigger, smaller, rotate it, adjust perspective etc... Depending on what makes it look cool... in my head.

I then left this bald girl that reminds me of Asajj Ventress and proceeded to make the animation of the hair on top.

I got cold feet... (￢_￢;) thought "what if I start with short hair, it should be easy than long hair". So I started painting her a short haircut.

Easy! I maintained low opacity in the hair's layers so I could see where the head and features were. I just wanted to leave it like that. More cold feet...

Then to add another frame... Man where to start? I duplicated the hair layer and tried to imagine how the hair would move and where it would be. Repeated this 5 times, 5 frames.

Luckily these frames of the short hair felt really smooth when painting them. I did not battled them that much and looked nice.

I left that as it was, went to eat, walk the beasts and did some chores.

Returned to battle the long hair. I did the same, started with a frame, lowered the opacity of the hair, duplicate and repeated.

With this one I did battled, cause at first I wanted to give it a look of inky hair. Like if it was liquid hair hahaha. Nonsense! It looked horrible it was a mess. There was no coherence in the movements...Sadly I did not saved all the eeeww-looking frames, I was super immersed in trying to grasp the movement and making it look sexier and simpler, cause it looked like crap. Honestly.

But after trying several times, little by little, I got to understand a bit more of the movement as well as how to simplify it. In the end I liked how it looked although it retained some of the inky blobbery rubbish (that now that I see it with fresh eyes doesn't look that good). (；⌣̀_⌣́)

I polished the girl.

And wanted to to experiment with white hair. I selected the content of the layers/frames of the hair.

Then applied through the menu: Select > Modify > Contract (that makes the selection, which envelopes all the blob of black hair, shrink) I contracted it 2 pixels.

Then cmd+delete(or backspace) will fill the selected space with the background color. I had white so...

Some artifacts came up. Just painted on top of them. And it looked like this:

Now that I think of it I could just block the opacity of the layers/frames of the hair and paint it white. But this way it woudn't have the black outline. Let's do it and see how it looks... (∩ᄑ_ᄑ)⊃━☆ﾟ･｡･:≡( ε:)

Looks quite nice.

So I made a few gradient-color overlays on top of them and these came out:

Rainbow hair.

Horizontal flip red noise poapdnapdjf.

And that's that. It would be good to experiment more with the time of the frames, it could look better.