AFoxInSpace

AFIS-style Blender Animation Template.blend

I made this .blend file from the last scene I finished with James in his Arwing. I just took most of the assets out, deleted the animation frames, and cleaned up the Compositor nodes, making them easier to understand.

This single ~20MB .blend file will be an example of my current 10-layer setup, and is intended as a template for all the future scenes that I create. 

Layer 01: Far Terrain
Layer 02: BG layer mesh objects
Layer 03: BG layer Grease Pencil lines/scuffs
La...

James lands his Arwing on Venom

I'm still going to add some stuff to this scene before I publish it to the YouTube, but here's a little video preview of what I've got so far. 

Forgive the horrible YouTube compression. Set it to 4k even if you don't have a 4k monitor, and it will look a million times better.

EPISODE TWO POLL - ALL PATRONS PLEASE VOTE

As of a timeline check today, Episode 2 is going to be about 28 minutes long. Out of the 20+ scenes already animated for it, there are still 3-4 really big scenes left to do from scratch in the second half of the episode, along with a lot of touch-ups and linking on smaller scenes throughout.  

Here are two options moving forward:  &...

Started a New Scene [4K Wallpaper]

Here is a 4K still from the next scene I'm working on for episode 2. 

Wolf driving scene, latest render

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43I80O9pbco

Here is a clip from the ~2-minute scene I'm animating that connects the O'Donnell living room scene to the one with Bill Grey in the hangar. 

I'm using the same lighting/shading technique on the vehicle as I do with the characters now. It really anchors the vehicle in the "cartoon world," looking much better than just using the 3d model with Freestyle ...

Mostly Moved In

I finally got my Canadian residency, so I'm finally beginning the moving process over the border. Because of covid stuff I'm having to do everything by myself, so my first trip was everything I could fit into my truck from my workstation. Other than a few sets of speakers and the piano, I'm set up and ready to go, and I won't be moving again. It's nice being able to put down roots for the first time in 16 years! Looking forward to working on animations much more comfortably, not to mention so...

Depth of Field Sorted

  I have a good template set up for quick adjustment of Depth of Field in my scenes now. This includes the post-added Freestyle Lines, by far the most difficult task I've had in a long time.

  Pictured are some WIP shots from the scene I'm animating right now. This is a bit that comes just before James gets up and begins his search for Pigma and Dess on the train.

  I'm starting to get more comfortable with Blender's drawing functionality, so I spent ...

James and Dess - New Scene Progress

Animating the meeting between James and Dess now.

There is only one scene in the episode that comes chronologically after the confrontation with the lemurs on the train, and once that scene is finished, it's mostly just going back and doing the little bitty scenes that tie all of the big ones I've done together. 

Still loads of work to do, but I'm starting to see a tiny light at the end of the train tunnel.

James Reanimated; Finding my Venom

Went back and polished James's walking animation (3/4 full walking animation is really tough!!), and stayed up all night working on designing Venom's look, trying to add landmarks reminiscent of the first SF games.

This is my first bit of full animation in Blender.

I'm  going to get James's walking forward animation done this weekend, as well as a few more Venomians on the train. 

A couple more tweaks here and there in the Compositor, but I think this new style is approaching its final form.

(The flickery world edges are just because this was down-scaled in Blender for GIF purposes)

Thank you for your patience.

It's been a hell of a ride these past few weeks, but I've got a lot of Blender XP under my belt. I started animating some of this traincar scene last night. Each of these character frames was drawn and colored in several minutes, almost effortlessly. I'll say again, there's going to be a few abrupt quality jumps here and there, but I'll do my best to smooth out the transitions. The animation still is--and always will be--hand drawn. For any people unhappy with this change over to Blender, I'm...

I'm sold on Blender. It's changed my life.

Blenderizing of all the characters used in the handful of scenes left for episode 2. 

Again, everthing you see here was drawn in Blender with the grease pencil. All characters are scale down to the exact inch of their bio's, and character palettes are all self-contained. So much streamlining of work, and no more having six Adobe apps open and crashing at once. I can't go on enough about how much easier and organized everything is going to be, let alone how much cooler the character...

100% Blender

I did some more Blender tests. The first picture is an example of what the train scene during the final act of episode 2 will now look like. Some other lighting/fog/fx tests, and an animated GIF of Fox and Wolf going all JoJo that I did from scratch in one day. I drew all of the 2d art with the grease pencil, and everything else was created and modeled in the program, as well. 

If I can create everything in the above images just from using Blender (which I totally absolutely did) &...

Experimenting With Better shading

For the past two days, I've been tinkering with a couple of ideas for shading on characters, as well as compositing completely in Blender. These are a little janky, but this is my very first attempt at trying something like this, and I think it would help in scenes that require dramatic lighting... not to mention, drawing these shadow layers manually on a frame by frame animation would be literal torture. 

Everything you see in these, other than drawing the actual characters, is do...

Downloadable Clip: "The Friggin' Guy"

Got the voice work and mouth animations done. All that's left is a little foley sound fx and some minor reflection animations and I'll be uploading this to YouTube to have its quality murdered by YT's codecs. So enjoy what I've got so far in downloadable mp4 format!

Special thanks to Tiana Camacho for the wonderful voice work on Falco's mom, Tina!

[ROUGH] The Lombardi Family scene (f-bomb warning)

Still have to record the lines with a v/a and do mine on a real mic, but these are placeholders to get the timing set for the final voice acting and mouth animations.

Researching a Possible Patron Reward...

It's the end of the year again, and I would like to do something a little more fancy than an illustration for my top patrons this year. 

Possibly something bigger, and handpainted. 

I'll have more on that in a week or two, as I have to do some research first.

In the meantime, have a 4k wallpaper of everyone's favorite Reluctant Duo (above).

...Wow.

I can't wait until episode 2 is finished, so I can get back to animating present-day Fox McCloud...

A Fox in Space - [CLIP] - "Dr. Andross Waits"

 Dr. Andross receives word from his head of security regarding James McCloud's departure for Venom.  

Voices: Dr. Andross - Matthew Gafford
Lt. Rhys - Sonny Hijena 

"A Fox Up To Camp" - 2019 Birthday Bash - Downeast, Maine

Had a good, fun birthday week at the camp with everyone. As you can probably tell from the photo, Bigby probably had more fun than anybody.

Time to get back to work!

The Arwings [rough]

Still got some planetary details to add and some background music to compose, but here's a preview of how the arwings are going to look, with James and Peppy taking off from Corneria.

Ladies Love Wolf O'Donnell

Hope you guys liked my little ten-day animation. I'll now be heading back to the rest of episode 2 to animate its remaining scenes at this much higher quality and speed!

One Week of Work.

This is honestly amazing, because this would have taken me weeks without Blender's help. I'd say my experiment was a success, mainly because it's going to mean a quality jump as well as a speed increase. Hope you guys like the difference!

A FOX IN BLENDER -or- Blending for a Week

Blender Models for Drawing Reference!

I've gotten ep.1 Fox and Falco, and ep. 2 Wolf Fara and James modeled and rigged so far. I have the heads of every character in the show modeled already, so the bodies take minimal time. All of these models were put together in the past couple days. Learning how to do this was what I spent 50-60 hours doing last week instead of streaming.

T...

2019-05-28 23:22:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Taking a break from streaming for a few days.

I'm doing some research with Blender, as well as a few other techniques that are going to involve my full focus, so streaming on twitch will be light for the rest of the week. 

This is all for the sake of getting episode 2 out as quickly as possible without losing quality--maybe even drastically increasing it--so bear with me while I go dark for a couple days.

Patron art cards sent out up to #40! 41-50 on the way.

 I will be contacting the remaining ten (41-50) this week for their free AFIS art. 

If you were #1-40 and you responded to the email I sent, you should have received your art by now. I hope you enjoy it!

If it hasn't arrived, or arrived in damaged condition, please do not hesitate to reply to that email again and let me know. I will replace it.

Sending out batch 2 tomorrow, batch 3 coming up!

Mailing out the inked art for batch 2 (top 50 patrons #11-20) from the post office tomorrow. 

I will be contacting patrons #21-30 this week via email and Patreon direct messages, so stay tuned!

Top Patrons 1-10 contacted, 11-20 next!

For the top patrons 1-10 that have replied to their emails: your original art has been mailed today! Keep an eye out for it by the end of the week. 

(A couple of the top 10 haven't gotten back to me yet, so I'm still holding onto theirs until they do. If this means you, check your Patreon email!!)

Getting my PO Box today. -or- More patron sketches...

Going to get a PO box at the post office so I can put a safe return address on these top 50 patron sketches. Once I have one, I will start sending them out to in batches of 10. I just didn't want to leave the return address blank in case of shipping error.

Also:

I may continue to do more sketches for patrons 51-100, maybe even more, but switch to just pencils-only for those remaining. They won't be as detailed and defined as the top 50, but I would be able to get many, many more o...

Top 50 Patron Sketches

Just confirming that I'm emailing 1-10 today! If you're one of those ten, please reply back asap!

The Original Signed Art for Top 50 Patrons

Just got back from MAGFest. Instead of streaming, I'm going to take a day and try and get the rest of these 50 pictures drawn. Once they're finished, I'm going to get in contact with the top 50 patrons on here via their email addresses.