September 2021 End of Month Animation Report (Patreon)

Hello again! Another month gone by, and not much to show for it this time -- but that doesn't mean I haven't been hard at work! 

Despite IRL stuff getting in the way, toward the beginning of this month I started work on "Mud Wrath", which you all saw a short preview loop of a few days ago.

I can't really say that this is the hardest animation I've done, but it's certainly presented me with tons of challenges, and I honestly think that the biggest setback for me right now is this particular hyena model. 

It's a really old character which I made over two years ago, and over the years I've modified it, updated it, tweaked it, all with the intention of making it better and easier to use. 

But I've learned a lot over the past couple of years. So despite my best efforts to bring this model up to my standards, the fact remains that the base it's built upon is so outdated that I couldn't hope to completely fix it, and unfortunately the main consequence of that is that every animation I create is more of a struggle than it should be.

Every time I make a new animation, there's something about the model that I have to fix or change, whether that be adding a temporary IK system on the head (like I used for "Hyena Roast"), or changing the bone constraints to have different kinds of torso rotation depending on the animation I'm doing, or weight painting -- the latter of which was so badly done initially that in every single animation I do, I end up having to fix it to some degree. But even if the weight painting was perfect, the topology of the model isn't, so it's a real situation, lol.

(This animation was two years ago! Would you believe me if I said the model used to look even worse?)

So, it's because of all of those issues that I've been gradually working on some new models over the past few months. Although my main goal with these new characters is to have them be much easier to use and animate, I also intend for them to ultimately look better as well. Anyway, I'm making really good progress with one of those characters, and I'm hoping that sometime next month I'll have enough for me to do a small showcase of it -- something which I'm really excited for. :D

Now, let's talk about the actual animation, lol.

So this is a pretty big one, at least in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish. 

The animation's general idea is something I've been trying to pull off for over a year, but I haven't really had the patience or even the ability to do so until now. It's mainly the model's aforementioned difficulties which have held me back.

But the other thing with this kind of animation is the amount of moving parts that all have to separately animated. 

You have the hyena himself, who has 105 bones, and three tentacles with 10 bones each, so another 30 on top of that, all of which have to be accounted for and animated and syncing up at all the right times -- so over the course of this animation which is over 40 seconds long, and at about 2,500 frames (so far), you can imagine the process of animating anything remotely complex would be a massively time consuming one, lol.

Issues aside though, I'd say the animation is turning out really well. With the rate it's been going at, I'd guesstimate I'll have the preview animation ready to go mid-next month, though I'm hoping that I can get it done a bit sooner than that. I'd also show you more, but the animation revolves around a little "surprise" that I don't really want to spoil.

For now, I'll leave you with a render.

Thanks for reading!