moving on to the background next! All depth sorting issues, final colors/details, and the NPR render of the 3D arm will be handled during final compositing.
The MP4 attached below is higher quality than the GIF above ✨
Also, as a kind of general announcement... After working through the entire pipeline several times, I have come to the conclusion that including as many frames as I have in my animations is not reasonable for the long-term. Animation productions usually split the labor among many people; it's a bit much for one person and at this rate I run the risk of burning myself out.
So, as a solution, I will try to keep future animations close to a single loop. In this current animation and previous ones, I included extra loops/frames because I wanted to show more personality from the characters and add more variety to the motion, but ultimately I think it's better to ease up on the frame count in order to both speed up production and decrease the chance of burning out. Production quality will otherwise remain the same!
I look forward to being able to publish animations more quickly; I hope that this change will be a win-win for everyone!