Technology
The creation of digital animations involves a lot of different pieces of hardware and software working together.
I started in 2008 with a simple copy of Macromedia Flash MX 2004, an AMD Athlon X2 desktop PC and a mouse and keyboard.
My main workstation, which I brought to my mother’s house during the 2016 holidays so I could keep working on Luna’s Determination.
To create scenery with a paint look but still keep a sense of depth, every background from Luna’s Determination was made from a basic 3D scene that would be rendered, then painted over, the final image then being distorted with the depth map of the render to keep the proportions right.
The downside of the technique is reflections don’t get properly distorted, as they move along with the surface they are on rather than how they would naturally move. It proved tricky for the final scene of Luna’s Determination, as the shiny floor was particularly noticeable in the scene.
For The Fall of Sunset Shimmer, the technique was improved, separating the diffuse and the specular (reflective) part of the image, then creating a depth map for the specular that would correspond to the depth of the part that is reflected rather than the surface. The two parts would then be distorted with their corresponding depth maps and combined together afterwards.
For The Fall of Sunset Shimmer onward, I use Toon Boom Harmony to animate my characters, using a rig with constrains and deformers to achieve a stylized look that can move in 3D space, but with enough flexibility for framings and movements that would only work in 2D.