Progress Update #88 (Patreon)

The Great Mighty Poo kicked my ass

Here are the rewards:

Video Download / Animatic - https://www.patreon.com/posts/hololive-43990121

Images - https://www.patreon.com/posts/12674978

PSDs - https://www.patreon.com/posts/12675354

Complete Project - https://www.patreon.com/posts/12675738

Lots of positive responses to the video! A lot of nostalgia for Conker! People want a Korone playthrough now, which I don't think it will happen because Conker never came out in Japan and she only plays on original hardware. But yeah, she finally saw the video today, she didn't comment on it, but I'm guessing that the giant poop monster at the end must have been very confusing 🤣. Fubuki saw it earlier and was amused! And a lot of people that worked on Banjo-Kazooie watched it and enjoyed it too, which makes me super happy!

And now that you guys watched it, I can finally talk about the characters, starting with Pumpkin Korone. She's basically a bouncing ball with a face, which is both very cute and a joy to animate! The pumpkin transformation in the game is wearing the Banjo shorts with the backpack and has no mouth. Here I decided to lose the clothing and keep the ears, tail and the mouth, which resembles a friendly halloween pumpkin with a lot of rounded corners. The basic shape makes the character very malleable, which helped a lot with the "kabocha-bokum" scene where she needed to resemble the Mumbo Token. I also really abused the squash and stretch of her movement, but I think it really fits the BK aesthetic.

Mumbo is one of those characters that I think looks much better in the game, like the model has a low-poly charm to it, and I think that has a lot to do with the eyes. I'm not a big fan of the round look of the N64 renders, and the painting in the Mad Monster Mansion level is the stuff of nightmares! So I wanted my mumbo to be like a mix between the in-game version and high-poly version, but also staying close to the Mumbo Token art style.

Great Mighty Poo was a lot of fun to animate in the beginning, but as I kept adding more stuff it just became very messy, and slow. I used a lot of fractal noise and displacement maps to create that sludge effect on the character, and After Effects absolutely hated it. Everything had to be high resolution because he got very close to the camera, so it took a lot of time to render and AE kept running out of RAM. But the most complicated part of this character are the hands, which are a mix of 3D and 2D. 

I opted for 3D because of the subtle movement of the hand and fingers. There was also going to be a lot of rotation and turning which is very hard to do with 2D. I still wanted the hands to look 2D though, so the 3D model is just acting like a mask here. I changed the color of each finger to have more control with the composition in AE. And after all the character animation was done I animated the 2D textures individually for each finger and the palm. It's not very practical, but since this is a short animation, it ended up working fine.

I don't think the next animation is going to have any 3D in it, but it is going to have some horses in it, because this March marked the 10th anniversary of Two Best Sisters Play, so I'm animating a little something to celebrate! And the telephone game animation is still on hold, but there's another holo member that I really want to animate. I'll share more in the next update!