djthed

Realistic Pichu

EDIT | November 15th, 2018, 12:53PM PDT 

First thing I addressed was the mouth, as that was the biggest point of contention for most people. I pushed the upper lips down to hide more of the teeth, adjusted the size of the lips, and adjusted the overall expression slightly.

Next was the f...

Pegasus Wing Rigging Progress

Been working on this for the past few days. I've never really done  much of anything with wings before. I've animated with wings once  before, and only once, but I never rigged or studied wing anatomy too  much. I've been kind of dreading the day I'd have to rig wings for  pegasi just due to the complications and challenges that's definitely  going to come from that. But considering my lack of experience, it seems  to be going off on a decent start. I want ...

Coloratura Animation "Nice House AJ!"

I haven't animated Coloratura in one of these one off animations in a while. I wanted to challenge myself a bit with something I haven't been doing a lot lately, which is walking, with the walk getting interrupted by other actions, and just overall weigh shifting. Making sure the model feels like it has weight is one of the most important things in my opinion to get right at this point. I've usually done a pretty good job at it, but I haven't tried to implement it in an animation with a lot of m...

Coloratura Expression Stress Test

I'm surprised I didn't think to publish something like this earlier. Something where I throw a ton of different expression types at my model's facial rig to see how well it works. And so far, it seems pretty good! But that's just my opinion. If you think something somewhere looks a bit off, let me know! Try to be specific, though. Saying "This one looks weird" with nothing else tends to not be very helpful,...

The Mane Attraction Set - WIP 9

Finally getting back into the swing of things. It's been an incredibly long time since the last time I showed progress on this set. You can find the previous version here for comparison:
https://www.deviantart.com/therealdjthed/art/4K-The-Mane-Attraction-WIP-8-Set-683193271

So, one of the main overall differences is instead of trying to copy the original shot to a ...

Coloratura Performance Intro WIP 3D Animation

It's sure been a long while since I've done any animations with lip syncing. And this is the first time I'm doing any kind of lip syncing with the new overhauled rig!

So, yeah. Just to show some of the hidden benefits of the new reworked rig that you guys will likely never notice, because it's all behind the scenes, I started working on this animation only 4 days ago as of uploading this animation. In contrast, the last time I did an animation like this was with Coloratura again in this video:...

Laying Coloratura

Available on the Redbubble shop!:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/djthed/works/34215552-laying-coloratura

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Huge shoutouts to jhayarr23 for letting me using his original vector as inspiration for this render! You can find the original vector here:
https://www...

It has been a while, Rara

Yes, yes it has.

Admittedly, I have been procrastinating a bit when converting Coloratura into the up to date rig, mostly because I'd have to remodel her eyelashes again and fit that into the rig, which would've been obnoxious, but it's done now. Her clothes also had to be remade because of the body getting a complete overhaul, the clothes from before just didn't fit the same way it used to.

It might be hard to notice from this angle, but I also did overhaul a part of her mane...

Winking Pichu

While most of my work lately has revolved around MLP, I was more originally interested in 3D Pokemon way before I got into MLP. There is a reason my Profile Picture is still the Leafeon render I made for myself about 3 years ago as of writing this description.

But there's another reason I made this. For one, I'm a pretty big Pichu fan, and I'm also a pretty avid Smash Bros. player. And all that combined with Pichu's recent confirmation that he's going to make an appearance as a playable ch...

Pear Butter Frolicking

This is in collaboration with another MLP artist, TheDiscorded! Obviously, a 2D artist collabing with a 3D artist isn't too usual around here, so here's how it went:

I asked TheDiscorded to create a few sketches with poses of one of the characters I already have modeled out. In this case he chose Pear Butter, and this was one of the sketches he came up with!:

Then I got...

Pear Butter Idle Animation

Haven't done one of these in a while. And I haven't used Pear Butter in like a year. Spent some time this weak porting over the up to date rig over to her, as well as updating her mane and tail with layered hair meshes. In that time I also decided to rework the eye textures a bit.

Old:

2018-07-27 00:30:45 +0000 UTC View Post

Cute Applejack

This render came about when I was just testing some poses. I thought the  smile was cute and thought I'd publish this. Nothing else too substantial to note. 

Applejack Poster Render

Wanted to do another Applejack render for a few reasons. The last one I did, the "Serious Applejack" one, had a few problems. The expression wasn't completely clear or easy to read, and the pose overall wasn't all that appealing. I also wanted to mix things up and try some new lighting I haven't used before. This is indoor lighting with the only light source coming from a bunch of ceiling lights directly above. It's a pretty common way to light things in the real world and I'm glad the model's l...

Furious Applejack

Boy, sorry for taking so long on this one. I had most of the animation done for a few weeks, but ran into some oddities with the rig around the front legs that I couldn't find a solution for some time. Seems to be all good now though.

The grass hasn't really changed since last time. Still the same models being emitted from the dirt plane. But I completely overhauled the tree model, as I did get a few comments saying that the tree really doesn't look like an apple tree based on how the branches...

Wandering Applejack

( Full-Res Wallpaper: https://goo.gl/rst2Zw )

I've been wanting to tackle more background related challenges  lately. I did try using some "Essential packs" for the foliage, but they  ended up being waaaay to render intensive for animatio...

Serious Applejack

Finally able to get the rig changes that I've been working on for the past few months applied to my other models! Not only that, but I also decided during this transition that I completely redo the topology of the body. The main reason of redoing it was to completely rework how the legs connect to the body in the mesh so that it can allow for both the front and hind legs to deform properly when posing them at extreme angles. It was a necessary change and I honestly should have done this sooner. ...

Expressive Pinkie Animation

 It's been a long time coming, but I'm glad to announce that I am finally considering the facial rig revision phase of mine is now over. It has lasted since around November of last year. The effects were obvious; I have only been posting Pinkie renders and animations for the last half a year. I've only been doing that because the facial rig revisions have only been applied to Pinkie, and it wouldn't be a great use of my time to transfer unfinished tweaks to other characters (AJ, Pear Butter...

Pinkie Pie Nervous Smile

The eyebrows are finally done aaaaaaaaaaaaah (or at least done enough to be usable). I've tried tons of different methods to get them to work the way I want them to and I finally figured out a way to rig them in a way that works well for me. I didn't expect them to be as complicated as it was, I thought the mouth would've been more complicated. Boy was I wrong. The eyebrows are completely shape key driven now, which basically means I different variants of the same mesh stored in shape keys, wher...

Pinkie Eyebrow Expression Render Test

This is a long time coming, and I should've done this sooner. Much sooner.

So in summary, I was having a lot of trouble getting the eyebrows to cooperate when they needed to move down towards the eyelids. But the fact that the two independent rigs of both the eyebrows and the eyelids were on the same plane, it was creating a ton of over-complications for the longest time, and it had me hung up for a good month. But yesterday I finally decided to go a different route. I reworked Pinkie's up...

Sitting Pinkie

First ever render of a pony that's actually not standing up. It's actually been a struggle trying to get my models to sit without the mesh looking weird and whatnot. How does it look?

Also let me know of what you guys think of the facial expression going on here. The half lidded eye, the wink, and the raised eyebrow... I dunno if that's too close to that "Dreamworks Face" stigma that's been a thing for a while now. If you guys hate it, let me know. I personally have mixed feeling about it beca...

Frightened Pinkie

Finally, the rig can actually make faces like this with properly placed creases and such to show that the face is real. So yes, the purpose of this render is once again to push the new rigging as far as I can. And I also have never publicly uploaded a pony face render that wasn't smiling, so this should mix things up quite a bit to my norm.

PC Upgrades and Future Hardware Plans.

I'm floored by how quickly I was able to get upgraded hardware for my main PC. I predicted that it would've been many, many months from now a month ago. But I've been getting so much support lately on Patreon and Paypal for the animations I create on my Deviantart, and as typical as it is for me to say this, I can't think you guys enough.

The next step is for me to save up for more PC hardware to build separate computers dedicated to just rendering. I have spare hardware from previo...

Pinkie Pie

Drawing a blank on names again. Maybe I should start making polls or something on what I should name these renders... Uhm... Anyway... 

I've been hard at work implementing changes to how the face reacts the certain types of expressions based on Dilarus's advice. This render doesn't necessarily showcase they yet, as it's not entirely ready. But I've had to rework how the lip corners are rigged in order to implement all the changes Dilarus suggested to help make sure the face bunches and sq...

Pinkie Hop Animation

It's been a while! I've been stressing over the quality of my model for a few weeks now, and it kind of got in the way of my releasing things to you guys. Thankfully I got tips from a veteran artist from the fandom and I managed to fix the issues I was having with the facial rig... Again. I'll put together a blog post on my DeviantArt page describing the improvements I made once this animation goes fully public.

Now, for the animation itself. I wanted to do Pinkie's signature hop/bounce to pra...

Pinkie Pie 3D Lip-Sync Animation Test

Been doing some heavy re-working on the mouth rigging for the past few weeks. Lots of experimentation going on here. Let me know if anything about the mouth in particular looks a bit off.

Also no I don't plan on actually animating the song that comes after this line, at least not in the near future. Just in case anyone was curious.

Playing with Clouds (V2)

Before this went public I decided to try to improve the clouds a bit more as I wasn't entirely happy with it. In fact, if you want to see how this evolved, here are some early WIPs that slowly progress to what I have now:

Version 1: https://sta.sh/0b0rggziq99
Version 2: https://sta.sh/01fxb57a1p68
Version 3: 2017-11-10 08:16:21 +0000 UTC View Post

Playing with Clouds

Title means two things. I'm currently playing with clouds in Blender by filling meshes with volumetrics and such. But it also means Pinkie's also playing with the Clouds... Or I guess IN the clouds. Close enough.

Might as well try to get used to working with clouds as they are pretty relevant in MLP for Pegasi, whenever I get to modeling wings that is. Biggest challenge here is how long this all takes to render. Volumetrics don't play kindly to render speeds. This took almost 3 hours ...

Discord Server and new Rewards

Finally figured out what I wanted to do with the rewards... Well, at least somewhat. I've added 3 more tiers in addition to the $1 tier for early access.



Tier 2 - allows for Discord Server Access. Directly chat with me about whatever on Discord, whether it be to give feedback about my work, patron rewards, or to just to get to know me.

Tier 3 - allows access to Raw, uncompressed, and non-watermarked frames for every animation I've rendered in th...

Hardware Upgrade Plans

I've finally settled on the parts I want to save up for upgrading my PC. The most limiting factor for my build is my processor. I'm currently running an AMD FX-8350. It's aged somewhat poorly and doesn't fit my needs very well. It doesn't run Blender very well, so it is somewhat challenging to do animation when the preview window's framerate for my animation doesn't play at full speed. Not a terrible CPU for general use for most, just not for me.

Here are the new parts I've decided ...

Super Smile Animation Test

Spent maybe about 3 hours animating a perfect loop animation for the base pose. Wanted to keep Pinkie moving and active, make it feel like she can't sit still with any part of her body at any time. Only thing I feel like changing is slowing down the bounciness. Especially after GIF conversion where it's forced to play slightly faster at 50fps instead of 48. But again, I'm just so happy my model can make expressions like this now, and also be animateable. Just amazing.