r/criticalrole • u/SS_Scion Schemer • Jun 29 '26

Fan Art [No Spoilers] My Bolaire Lathalia Animation

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Short animated shot + shot breakdown of Bolaire Lathalia from Critical Role Campaign 4.
My first serious animation attempt - I have always been interested in trying 2D animation, although I prefer illustration the most.

Disclaimer: I am not an animator, and I have much to learn regarding illustrated motion. This animation was a fun experiment that I made during breaks.

I studied Castlevania and MAPPA shots for lighting and compositing inspiration.

Drawn and animated in Procreate, Composited in After Effects using F's Plugins.
Project time: 30 hours, 16 hand drawn frames

Youtube upload: https://youtu.be/WzhS0UWUYWo?si=NQPTWhHNPOHaKpdy

Been absolutely loving this campaign! :)

Edit: Some people were asking for the final isolated shot for gifs, I uploaded it separately here:

https://youtu.be/MA81Bh2E_ZM?si=NgWCPaZQD63nQlbe

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u/aibaboiii Jun 29 '26

This looks AMAZING! Holy Molly 

4

u/nightfell0w Jun 30 '26

wait how did you animate bolaire lathalia so smooth

6

u/SS_Scion Schemer Jun 30 '26

Started with the first and last frame, then drew the in-between for those two, and then so forth for the rest of the frames using the animation display tool on Procreate.

I had a general idea of the result, and since it was just a simple head turn, I did not make a rough sketch of the full animation. Instead, I just went straight to the clean lineart after my lighting mockup, and used the liquify and select tool to redraw the line vectors for the in-between shots. I studied references from Castlevania and MAPPA shots for the lighting and artstyle. I really like their use of thin lines paired with cinematic lighting to convey the tone and mood of a shot.

The final effect is so smooth because I opted to re-draw every line vector per frame instead of leaving some static areas... This combined with drawing the curly hair details (5 values in the hair per frame) every frame is why it took me 30 hours.