Progress Update #60 (Patreon)

Man, I was hoping to finish the animatic before the mlp finale aired in the US. And this update is super late too... I'm really sorry, you guys!

This is a short video, but it's very fast paced, so I want to break it down and go over some of these scenes.

We start with a transition to Grogar, showing him enslaving all the ponies and preparing to take over the rest of the world. I exported the sketches over to Maya to build a 3D scene with the rotating globe, but still, the background here is pretty simple, it's just Grogar's lair and a few ponies. I'm not super happy with it, I think the scale has to be a lot bigger, and it should feature some of the other villains too. So I'm gonna make some changes for the final version.

The Mane 6 (minus AJ) return to earth and crash-land their ship in the castle of friendship, "saving" their friends from Chrysalis in the process. And Twilight orders the young six to activate the giant Horse Mech of Harmony.

Did I mentioned the giant horse mech in my previous update? No? Well, they pilot a giant horse mech in the final battle, there you go!

So, this 3D robot is the reason for the late update. I had some troubles with the rigging and the animation, and I ended up having to scrap and redo some stuff.

But, building the mech was a lot of fun though! I don't have a lot of experience with giant robots, so I decided to download some gundam models. I took them apart, fixed the geometry and experimented with the different pieces from all the models. They were all humanoid bipedal mechs, but I wanted some animal features on my robot, so I implemented the tail and the quadruped legs. The head I modeled from scratch, but I stayed close to that gundam design. You can definitely see it in the eyes, right?

I had this giant mech idea in mind from the start, so I'm very committed to it.But I get that it's weird to just have this giant thing show up out of nowhere. So I'm thinking about adding some foreshadowing earlier in the animation, maybe have the silhouette of the robot in the background, just a little hint to make the reveal at the end a bit less jarring.

I wish I had more to show you guys, but this is it for now. There are only two sequences left, and if everything works out, the next update is going to be the full animatic completed, finally!