Taurus - VFX for a 2D Illustration
It’s time to reveal my new artwork upgrade - say hi to Taurus!
Taurus animated version (for uncensored version click here)
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Taurus original illustration (for uncensored version click here)
The illustration was done by Verena Demel (instagram, portfolio). Everything else was done by me, mostly in Unity.
Here are some insights into the project:
I tried out a rather unconventional workflow by projecting the illustration onto a human 3D model with the same pose in Maya to be able to animate the body. In Maya I used a camera with perspective first, but I couldn’t get the same exact camera settings in Unity, so I had to use a orthographic camera setup and therefore I not only posed but distorted the 3D model to compensate the missing perspective distortion. And I had to do this step twice, because I didn’t deactivate the Segment Scale Compensate attribute of the joints in my first go what led to unwanted distortions in Unity 
I got the illustration from Verena as a well organized (or kinda organized) PSD and I exported as many separate layers as I needed and imported them as sprites in Unity. So except for the body and the effects everything consists of sprites.
http://imgur.com/dFNQgoT
For the moving hair, the veil and leaves on the shoulders I used a refraction shader with a mask, as I already did in my last artwork upgrade. For the veil I also used a cloth simulation, because it needed to sit in the crook of the arm while the arm is moving. The plants effects were made with particles using Unity’s new trail module and several sub emitters with one using the new light module - I used these two modules for the first time and it’s impressive what you can achieve with them! For the tendril trail particles I enabled world collision, used geometric colliders for the hand and the arm and two wind zones to attract the particles to the palm.
http://imgur.com/CHG5EkS
The Unity scene isn’t optimized because the performance wasn’t important for the sole purpose of this artwork upgrade.
Finishing this project took way longer than expected. It was fun to upgrade Taurus and I learned a lot …but I think I’ll go for smaller VFX projects from now on 
I know about tools like Spine for 2D animation (and I probably going to try it next time) but I wanted to see how far I can get with my approach.
I’d really appreciate your feedback!
Oh and I didn’t find out anything about the content guidelines here on RTVFX, so I hope the degree of nudity in this post is alright.