Hazbin Hotel's Drop Shadows still intrigue me

I still haven't seen Hazbin Hotel on AMAZON PRIME yet. I really need to but things with my job at the Airport as well as working on this blog as well as my own animations have really eaten up my schedule.

I'm surprised I'm the only one who noticed the faint drop shadows on the digital cels on HAZBIN HOTEL and nobody brought that up on Facebook, even with all it's groups dedicated to the show.

I guess the public.... er... fanbase doesn't care about the technical aspects of cartoon making and would rather just enjoy.... or nitpick what they like or don't like... 

For me, I'm more technical 75% of the time due to my $50,000 art school education so I do need to get into the technicalities of the software, tools, and of course, the guts of the computers used in these projects. That's also why I built my own computer and also got an uber-expensive graphics card to go along with it.

Anyhow, Back to topic. 

In my previous post dedicated to HAZBIN HOTEL, i mentioned that the show uses drop shadows on it's digital cels. It's very faint but you can actually see the slight drop shadows on the artwork.

I think the drop shadows are only prevalent either viewing screenshots or watching the show on either a 1440p Monitor or 4K Monitor/Television.

I'm currently using an ASUS TUF VG27AQ 1440p monitor so it's a slight leg up from the MSI OPTIX G2712 1080p monitor I was using up to that point. As a matter of fact, my HAZBIN HOTEL post was the last one made before my MSI monitor crapped out.

Anyhoo, the drop shadows, I browsed my screenshots and this is the best that isn't obstructed by other characters or dark environments.

"And by dark, Maverick meant the backgrounds painted in dark colors like brown, purple, or burgundy."

I also have a hunch that the show is puppet-rigged.

I'm normally against puppet-rigged animation due it being used by executives to hold animators hostage to sticking strictly with conventional techniques instead of experimentation, but when my TECHNICIAL HALF of myself looks at cels like these, It makes me wonder, how did both SPINDLEHORSE TOONS and BENTO BOX pull this off?

As far as I know, my only attempt at doing old school drop shadows on digital animation was with keeping everything hand drawn.

I even have my Node Graph to show off how I pulled it off.

The fact that these companies who worked on HAZBIN HOTEL have actually pulled off the job on adding drop shadows to puppet rigged assets intrigues me.

Oh well, I'm planning a TOON BOOM Harmony Tips posts this month using the rigs I have in my hard drives.

I do plan to experiment with the drop shadows the same way HAZBIN HOTEL is doing but it's going to take a while. While the building of the drop shadow nodes would be easy, the hardest part is documenting the process in the most simple manner possible.