Double Tentacles, Patreon Release (Patreon)

So after a bit of a wait, this double tentacle animation is finally finished!

I had some trouble with the animation on this one, but outside of that it wasn't too difficult -- didn't have all the crazy amounts of problems rearing their heads like usual, lol.

However, for some reason during the entire first half of the animation the denoiser wasn't working. So I figured I would be able to take the already-rendered frames and just re-composite them through the denoiser node. But no, I had to rerender half the animation. :| lol. But aside from that, there weren't many issues.

I also employed Blender's NLA editor again this time to split the animation into two different stages, creating separate actions for each. One big difference between the last time and this one, however, is that I didn't merge them all back together into one big animation at the end. Instead, I kept the NLA "strips" separate.

At first it was obvious that they were two separate animations, as the animation would basically ease down to a stop before proceeding onto the next. However, it turns out you can overlap strips and blend between them, which made the transition very seamless.

The only issue with doing it this way is that if I need to go in and fix the animation, there's no way to easily do it while it's a strip in the NLA editor. You can tweak actions, but there seems to be a bug when an action is an NLA strip and the strip isn't at the very start of the timeline where you try to select the keyframes and it won't select the right ones.

So, the only way to fix it then is to delete the NLA strips, go back and tweak the original actions, and then push them back down to the NLA editor.

Seems to work pretty well overall but I'm still not completely used to this workflow yet. But it is nice to have actions/animations be in separate, smaller clips. Once animations get to a certain length and you have all of these keyframes, it can get pretty unwieldly, lol.

But overall, I think it turned out really well. There's some really minor stuff that slipped through, but nothing that I believe compromises the overall quality of the animation.

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for all your support. ^.^