The camera imp (Patreon)

This is an idea I was really going back/forth on in my mind on executing, because it would involve modeling another character, but I kind of went ahead and did it :x

The idea is that this is the fellow who was holding the camera for the dragon in the animation- the one he refers to as "small fry." He just does what the dragon tells him because maybe he's employed by him? He just likes to do it? Who knows.

But one thing that the camera imp does is scout out possible folks to mess around with. He persuades them into making an audition video of sorts, then the imp takes it back to the dragon and he decides whether or not he's into it.

In the kobold's animation, he'll be just off screen, visible some times, and who the kobold babe talks to while doing various cool things on cam. After the credits, we would see the dragon reviewing the kobold's video on a monitor or something and reacting positively, tying this animation to the culmination of all this stuff, hinting at the bigger picture...

I won't be showing anything regarding this camera character publicly until the animation is done! I want the reaction to be like "huh... what's going on?" then they see the bit at the very  end and it's like "... what the heck!??"

I drew this sketch of what he might look like:

Then I just... started making him in 3d. Initially, I didn't think he'd have fire hair. But I really was feeling in the mood for something more out there, design wise... So I gave him a more traditionally fire-ish appearance, typically associated with hell (though, the dragon and him aren't necessarily demons, maybe they're just magical but goth idk).

I just realized he's not wearing the spiked collar- I did model that, but it's very late here and I need to get to sleep! So instead of redoing all those gif recordings, here's this for now:

His skin is still a bit... too shiny? I'll mess with it more later...

I've added jiggle to his rig as well as the kobold girls.

I had this idea of... maybe I can add some wiggle/bob to the [p][p] when it's hard using bone dynamics. I did! There's a bone that jiggles, then a bone that is a child of it. The bone that's used to point the pp is copies the transforms of the jiggling bone's child, so it has a subtle movement. This can be turned on or off, so switching between automated pp movement and keyframed animation is easy (same with the balls).

If you're into rigging, I highly recommend using this add-on! It works really well, in combination with drivers to swap between using physics and not:

https://www.blendermarket.com/products/bonedynamics

If you want, I can go into more detail on the imp guy's weird material stuff... it was pretty fun to do and is procedural. Not anything too crazy, though.

I really need to get some sleep though! I'll begin actually animating something tomorrow... pretty excited for that!