Progress Update #59 (Patreon)

Yo, so the season 9 finale is out already. The Dutch version aired earlier, and now the English version is out too. I couldn't resist and I end up watching it last week, but I'm not going to talk about it now, because I know that there are a lot of people waiting for the official release in the US. So let's try to keep the comment section spoiler-free too!

I told you guys I was taking some artistic liberties! In this version of the story Daybreaker is real, Stygian was never defeated, and Luna never became Nightmare Moon, Celestia just banished her to the moon and she's been stuck there ever since (taking care of her bat ponies). Luna finally meets with the mane 6 after they crash on the moon, and with the help of a friendly alien, they are able to return home (except for AJ, lol).

I've been making some basic 3D models in Maya to use as a reference. Most of the time I just place some cubes and spheres around to help me establish the composition and the camera movement. But in the case of the spaceship animation, I was really struggling with After Effects, I tinkered a lot with the layers and the keyframes, but I just wasn't getting a good result. So I finally decided to model and animate the ship in Maya, and I'm really happy with it. the movement is very fluid, and the high FOV helps create a very cool effect as the ship flies through the camera, I really love the motion in this shot! Even though it's animated in 3D, I'm not going to render anything in Maya. I want to keep things 2D, so I'm going to rotoscope the ship, refine the animation a little bit, add some motion blur, squashing and stretching, and make sure all the characters look good when the ship is going through the camera.

I also learned something new, and it's super cool: you can import Maya's camera into After Effects without any plugins. you just drag the .ma file into your project window and After Effects will import the camera and the keyframes as well! It would be really awesome if you could import groups and locators as nulls, but unfortunately, it's just the cameras.

So, the last part is relatively short, just 36 seconds long, and it doesn't seem like much, but there's A LOT happening in these 36 seconds. The villains take over the world, the Mane 6 come back and crash-land the spaceship, they join forces with all the other creatures of Equestria, meet the villains in a giant arena, and everybody clashes into a big battle. I know, it's a lot to convey in a short amount of time, but I'm just following the beat of the song!

And I have to animate that beginning part as well, I already got some stuff sketched out. It's 10 seconds long but it's nowhere near as complicated as the ending, so that's good!