Project Updates - WIP Andre Anim Comm, Spyro Anim Release & Poll Results

whats poppin

This month, my goal is to start getting more active with new content, so today here is the first installment of stuff that's been worked on the past weeks, and things that will be worked on in the following weeks.

Spyro Animation Release [PUBLIC]

A scrapped project featuring no-name's Spyro model has been rendered and released to the public. It's nine seconds, and does not contain sound. You can find the video link on this FurAffinity post. 

This is nothing new if you've been on the Discord since it's already been teased there. 

Almost a week ago, I released a Spyro short to test a bit of my animation skills with reasonably fast-paced movement and manual overlapping motion (no dynamic bones!1!!). This was done months ago and I feel like I did pretty good for what I know :D 

Oh, it also has lewd stuff involved too.

Big thanks to no-name for letting me use it! It was a lot of fun! If you like the model used, you can visit his Patreon page where it's available for purchase.

Poll Results & Conclusion

As most of you know from my last post I whined about it being hard to find the motivation to work on Untitled. As a result, I posted a poll to see what you would want from me in terms of content - whether I stream my work on Untitled or seek out other side-projects/ commissions.

I should've also noted that the poll would not have been the final decision of a choice if it received the most votes - it was merely a way to gauge how my patrons felt regarding the change. With the top two results barely being tied, I kept it on my mind for some while to see what would be the most productive decision for me.

I received a lot of feedback from you guys and I genuinely appreciate everybody's opinions on the matter. While one side of me appreciates your guys' freedom of choice, the other side of me still feels bad if I stop working on Untitled for too long. I don't want to distance myself too much from the project since most of you most likely want to see that done than anything else (and I hear you). But at the same time, I want to be productive and enjoy the work I make for people, and it's been hard to do that with Untitled right now.

So, as a result, I've decided to take a break on Untitled the past several days and work on other side-projects, which is mentioned in the next category.

Keep in mind that I still love to animate! But Untitled just feels like a drag at the moment! However I've realized that streaming my progress and talking to people helps my productivity a lot! I'm hoping in the future I can stream my progress on Untitled at Picarto or something, maybe you should follow it for surprise streams :o

ABX002 - New Andre Animation Commission for Narse

A short animation project featuring Andre is currently in production.

Narse is giving me the opportunity to work on this project for him and it's been a lot of fun so far! Things have been really shaping up to look really good and I'm super excited for the final results! 

This project was actually started many days ago, here's what has been worked on since then:

Environment

Even though the dragon bits are the most important part, my goal is to attempt to keep things... "immersive" with a reasonable looking background.

I love nodes, and I'm glad I can really start screwing around with them to make some procedural ground.

This isn't really impressive right now, but basically it's four shaders being piped through Material/Displacement Blenders. Its goal is to place the shaders based on the RGB channels of the ground's vertex colors, which looks like this abomination:

This RGB barf however is important so each shader can house the red, green and blue channels exclusively. In short, this makes the background look less boring :p

Additionally there's another black and white vertex color map to add procedural rocks on top of the ground too!

To finalize everything, I've scattered some grass, trees and other stuff to sugarcoat the floor, giving you that sample render as shown above :o

Keep in mind the renders are not complete and there is much more to add, but for now it's looking hella solid!

Animation

I'm almost complete with all the blocks for this project. Once it's all done, I hope to release the WIP animation for patrons! So far it's turning out really cool and I'm excited to show you guys :) I don't want to spoil anything regarding what's going to happen in the scene just yet, but here's a little hint: butt.

Blender Code D:

Andre has had a lot of issues with  his twist bones recently that had to be refined. Because it's going to require a whole new setup, the old drivers that automatically drive the rotation of these twist bones must be replaced with the new ones. There is probably 20 or so of them, and each takes about a minute or so to test and set up properly.

As you can see, this process takes up a lot of time. Since I add a lot of twist bone drivers to most of my blender models, I decided to spend some additional time to make a Blender script that automates my entire twist-bone process x(

Basically you select two bones, the first one you select will be the driver that the second bone will copy its rotation from. It's simple but much more efficient now!

If anyone somehow possibly finds this useful, you can download this script for free on my GitHub. Should work for Blender 3.0 and higher.

...but yeah! Things are coming along awesome-ly and I am excited to show you the animation work in the coming days :)

ALSO,

The Trello page for this project is available here. As of writing there's nothing on it yet, but will eventually get filled with checkboxes and other info as I continue to work on it.

That's it!

Thanks everyone for your patience while things are being worked on. It's quite the process, but I appreciate those who are being patient throughout this process :))

Take care everyone, and may you all have a great summer!

A