while i was quite comfortable in Adobe Animate drawing all the vector components of the puppet, but when it came time to get these assets out of Animate and into Blender for rigging, things weren’t so straight forward.. after experimenting with a few options, the best one i found was pulling the SVG into Illustrator, then after renaming the layers to the appropriate part, export the layers as assets. this worked but wasn’t going to scale..
for a moment last night as i looked for ways to export layers directly from Animate, i started to seriously consider writing some Actionscript to support the export. thankfully i didn’t go to far down that rabbit hole. clearly when most of the links for documentation were broken, it was clear i was in no man’s land.
anyway i digress.. fortunately i had a moment of clarity when i thought “why don’t i just do the artwork in Blender with the Grease Pencil?” and skip all the extra workflow and tools. this would mean i’d have get out of my comfort zone and start to really start honing my Grease Pencil skills. i guess this was a matter of when not if.. so here we go, my first pass at building Madison’s puppet directly in Blender
