March 2019 Progress Post (Patreon)

Apologies
I want to apologize for the months of no posts this month regarding the projects I’ve been working on. To be honest, I was going through a rough time emotionally, but I’m slowly getting over it. During this time, I decided to investigate more ways to improve my animations which seemed to pay off in the Nekopara video. With that said, let me talk about the projects I’ve been working on.

Completed Projects
After releasing the Nekopara video last February, I shifted my focus on wrapping up the “Modern Sonic Travels to The Past” animation. Even though the animation was technically done in mid-February, I felt like there were some improvements that were needed for it. Either way, the video is done and should come out this Wednesday. $5+ Patrons should be able to see the video now.

Another project I finished was Gohan’s merch video featuring Broly. One thing was interesting about this video was the new color grading techniques I’ve used in the video. Even though I color graded the Nekopara video, I increased the saturation of the colors for the video making the colors much brighter. I plan on using this technique for future animations since it removes the gray sheen I typically see in the lighting for my videos.

Patreon Commissions
Since I’ve been receiving more Patreon requests lately, I thought I discuss them here. First Patreon commission I’m going talk about is from Lord of the Unknown. The first request I’m going to work for him is his Phoenix Wright animation request. For this request, I want to have the first two thirds of the video match the beat of the Pursuit theme before switching to the surprise ending. Even though I don’t think the animation will be too long, I cannot give a proper estimate as to when it will be done. I do plan on working bits and pieces of it in the meantime. Lord did ask me to work on another RWBY animation, but I need to port Blake’s model to SFM before doing so.

The other request I got was from Noah. Noah liked the SAO Fatal Bullet streams so much that he asked if I could animate one of the moments from the animation. Even though I’ve done SAO animations in the past, I wanted to take the chance to improve the SAO models, so they won’t look as bad as the ones from last time. I asked Guimian to modify the models to make the textures much flatter and it seems like they are going in the right direction. Once I pay Gui for the work, I’ll pick a highlight moment to animate using the models.

Ongoing Projects
Now I’m going to talk about the next It Came from The Stream animation. Technically, this is a finished project, however I realized that the Neptunia models used for the animations needs to be improved. I realized that the shadows for the models looked too soft making it look like they do not have any shadows at all. But, once I fixed those models, I will render the animation immediately. It also made me realized that in the future, I need to have the models set that way if I need to edit the base file, it will automatically update my models for the animation. Not going to lie, this is historic since this is the first official Blender animation on the channel which I’m excited about. It’s also the first animation on the channel that uses cel-shading rather than regular lighting. 

Even though I finished the Saber Says animation sometime ago, I wanted to take the time to take everything I learned from the past couple of months and vastly improve the animation. Right now, I have only one skit left to improve and I need to make Saber’s, Shirou’s, and Archer’s textures much flatter, but the animation should done in time. I also wrote some scripts for another My Hero Academia parody, TWO One Piece parodies, and another Dragonball Super animation. 

The next Dragonball animation I’m going to work on is an MRW: Dragonball Super Broly video. The video is basically a crude semi-accurate summary of what happened in the Dragonball Super Broly movie. I managed to get all the voice lines and just need to get Frieza’s…new model done. 

For the One-Piece videos I talked about, one of the videos is going to be a standard SFM parody, while the other will be done in Blender for a One Piece collab I decided to join. It’s kind of weird that this is the first collab I’ve entered which will be submitted to Newgrounds, but nevertheless I’m excited. 

I also wrote a script for another One Piece parody in which Zoro and Perona goes to a Build A Bear workshop. Unlike the One Piece video I’m doing for the collab, this will be animated in SFM since it’s a somewhat long animation. I also had to commission Tsuna to make the Build A Bear workshop scenery for the animation since there were none in SFM. I plan on asking Gui to modify Zoro and Perona’s models using the self-illum technique we used in the Nekopara animation since it resulted in the skin textures being flat. 

Finally, I wrote a script for another MHA video. The video will be another fight animation between Urakara and Toga fighting over whether Urakara should friend Toga on Facebook. It’s silly, but I’m hoping to take what I learn in terms of animating fights and amplify it to 100. However, I will not work on the animation until I get storyboards done for it.

Oh! I almost forgot! Progress has been made on the Goku vs Shaggy animation. Gui and Peixoto finished modifying the Shaggy and Dragonball Fighter Z models that will be used in the animation. I spend some time figuring out how the shadows should react for the models and I came up with the following solution. I plan to have some parts of the model have fixed shadows and other parts have regular shadows. That way, the shadows on the face always look good. I also finished setting up the rig for the Shaggy model and will move towards setting up the rig for Goku, Vegeta, and…one other character that will appear in the video.

As for the Hamster Face Man project, that’s being slowly worked on as well. Peixoto is working on the palette swappable Ninja model for the animation. He’s been making great progress on it and I cannot wait to see the result. I also plan on asking Tsuna, who made the Build The Bear Workshop scenary for the One Piece animation I talked about, to make the dojo setting for the animation.

So that’s about it. I also wanted to let new Patrons know that I do post WIPs more frequently on my Discord server, so feel free to join there and visit the Patron chat! Anyway, it’s good to be back and I hope you guys have a wonderful day or night! Laters!