Hello there, ponies of the night:
Spirit reporting progress here. Fiuu! it is been long since the last post, but we have progressed quite a tad.
Right now I am making fully functional foals for the final sequence of COTN. We had builds before, but they were meant for a completely different animation technique, so the process was really painful and mostly slow.
The new functional builds include a 10 point turn around (T.A) of the character, for only a 180º rotation, so it is actually a 20 point T.A when you flip them.
As an extra challenge, we made them rotate smoothly, which I will show in a future post. I took a Fluttershy T.A that goes around the net as reference, and from that, I started to make amends and improvements, such a fully functional mouths, hooves, eyebrows, hair, tails.. in short, every single body part.
While doing all this, I noticed a few bloopers in my initial character design, specially in Tingle. In the first pass I made him really messy, but the shapes kinda got out of hand, and it didn't read well as a character that is related to electricity. Taking example from how LF conducts her designs, I got the following result, which is a lot more clear and shape driven.
LEFT= BEFORE RIGHT= AFTER
Some comments ont he design got me a bit worried about if these kids would or not blend well in the actual show. After calibrating the importance of this matter, I decided to put each of them to a test over a background of Ponyville.
So far, here is the result for this little fella.
The first two foals, Spirit and Candlelight, took a very long time, mostly because I had to build from scratch, and let me tell you, a fully functional pony has a LOT of pieces. Today I made two working at mid pace, so four foals down, 8 to go.