Progress Update #70 (Patreon)

Oh, man. I tried super hard to finish a new Sailor Horse before the end of the month. I almost did it, but there's a lot of frames in this one. It will be ready by Monday, so I'll talk more about it then, but I just couldn't delay this update any longer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShc0L0hLLM

Here's a little sprite animation I made earlier this month, it's about Luna taking a trip to outer space! And I had the opportunity to experiment with something new: particle generated hair! I usually make a displacement map to generate Luna's and Celestia's magical mane, and that works fine when they are sitting still and there's not a lot of motion (or if they are continuously moving in a single direction). But in this one, Celestia is traveling at high speed going in and out of the planet, so I needed a better solution, and I think this worked out pretty well.

It takes some tweaking in each scene, but the basic shape of the hair is generated through particles, and the colors are added through multiple layers and blending modes. It's definitelysomething that works better because of the sprites. I don't think this effect would translateas well in a high resolution, regular Best Sisters episode. But there's a lot of potential here. I'll keep experimenting! Here are the assets:

Sprite sheets: https://www.patreon.com/posts/12674978
Sprite sheets, gifs, character vectors: https://www.patreon.com/posts/12675354
Complete AE project: https://www.patreon.com/posts/12675738

You're gonna need this plugin for the particles. I recommend grabbing the trial version.

Going back to Best Sisters Play. I animated Cadence and finished that scene from the last update. I tried a different method of lip-syncing with Luna where I would manually animate the mouth shapes of each phoneme to achieve a better animation quality. but it didn't look that much better, and the process was so painfully slow, that I decided to just stick with the old method. I did animate two other characters as well, which turned out really good! But I don't want to spoil the whole scene.

I also started animating Shantae herself! I'm really digging the outline look, turns out it does take a bit more work to apply the effect in these type of characters, but I'm committed to it! This scene is still in the earlier stages but I'm very optimistic about it because it involves a lot of palace guards, and they are all wearing helmets, and that means no lip-syncing!?It also means a lot of exaggerated eye expressions, which I also love a lot!