Work in progress (Patreon)

Here is my latest update on the work I have done so far for the ponies. I held off on posting here through Patreon for awhile until I had enough to do a bigger post. When I venture into new artistic tools it tends to be very technical and difficult until the later stages. So not many pretty and bug-free visuals appear until I have learned a tool fully.

During this past time I have been active on the Discord server where I posted updates and recieved good criticism on the additions and changes I did to the ponies.

By now I wish I had reached the point of working on Celestia/Luna, most work that I had to do before them is done so I am not far from it. But I still have some important texturing work left before I work on the alicorns. Which I will show below.

Some of the things that have been done since the last update:

I did some model changes in locations to improve its quality overall. I remodeled the face so it used better topology, but nothing has changed visually about it. That's an example of something that's technically changed so it works better for animation, but no noticable visual difference in a still image.

Open wing models have been created for pegasus and alicorns, but still needs some tweaking in visuals so they fit the body.

The most visual change is a new hoof design that hints more towards a real hoof.
(The old design is behind the new hoof design, a comparison in their silhuettes).

Most of my time has been spent making and learning about the new hair system I wanted to use. It's a new area for me, it's always quite difficult and slow to progress until you become comfortable with it. By now I have made Twilight and Fluttershy's hair, and I have done animation and physics tests on the hair to make sure it works 100%.

I know the hair system pretty well by now thanks to all the problem solving back and forth. But it was a lot of work to reach that point!

Below is some images of the hair I made for Twilight and Fluttershy. In the upcoming days I will be tweaking the body textures and hair material. Hair material ended up bright on Fluttershy so I am going to tweak the values of her hair and learn from that.
Body texture is also too plain right now since the fur is not visible enough, so that is something that will be adjusted too.

Download Hair_Render_TS.webm to see the hair physics test I did.

Fluttershy's hair, which needs some tweaking in the material so it is not too bright while in sunlight. Wings were not made at this point so they are missing from these images.

What I will work on next:

Twilight and Fluttershy is on the cusp of animation ready. The things they need to be done is a good fur texture that really shows up nicely and detailed on the body. As it is now I have already drawn a fur texture for the body, but its values are too weak. With some tweaking I will be able to get a good shine out of it.

Some pictures of the wing model below, this one will be used for pegasus and alicorns.
Its main issue right now is that it is too detailed for the body, hence why it is so important to get the fur texture to look right. I am also going to simplify the feathers on the wing a little so it doesn't go overkill on detail.

To put simply, hair and wings are very detailed but the body is not, so there is a clash in visuals.
The body texture is going to be worked on so it all fits together and has the same amount of details.

The visual clash between the detailed wings and hair together with the (almost) furless body that needs tweaking:

Example of how the fur is going to need to look, so it's clearly visible:

When the things above have been completed I am going to make Celestia and Luna. With the alicorns I will be able to make image sets of them (which means I can finally start making content again!). Image sets are good because it means I can get more clop done for you guys between animation work.

And with the finished Twilight and Fluttershy I will be able to do the bukkake animation that was planned on for awhile now.

The list of things to do for Celestia and Luna would be: an alicorn body/muscle sculpt, body height adjustments, two sets of hair (3 pieces each, 6 in total) and alicorn color setup.

As I progress I will frequently be posting images and discuss what I work on in my Discord server. So if you would like smaller but more frequent updates, check that out. It's a great place to share your design/art criticism at. It's always helpful to hear people's opinions while I design things, since it vastly improves the end product.