In The Woods, Full Patreon Release (Patreon)

Note: The uncompressed version of the animation is attached to this post.

Hello hello! Finally got this animation fully rendered, lol.

I really gave myself a challenge with this one. What started out as a simple tentacle loop turned into a longer loop, which then became several different animation stages until eventually it became what you see here. I'd get it to a point, then stop and think okay, this is the last stage. And then I just added more and more.

Normally I wouldn't do that sort of thing to myself, but I wanted this to be a complete animation with a beginning, middle, and end -- as opposed to my shorter loops.

And since I intended for this to be the last animation with this specific model (for now, at least), it only seemed appropriate that I tried to push the animation further than I normally would.

But it has been an immense challenge to complete this animation. There were many times when I ended up doubting whether it was within my capabilities to do this sort of thing; a lot of times when I was completely stuck and not knowing if it would be possible to finish this.

It took a long time to create this and animate all of the different parts, but because this animation is longer than any of my other animations, it also took a long time to even render it (not including the hours it took to figure out and bake the fluid sim). About 27 hours in total for just the render.

This animation was also a lot more involved than my other ones, and I had to really focus on each part to try and get it looking as good as possible. The process for making each stage was mainly:

1. Keyframing with constant interpolation, then adjusting the timing,

2. Change interpolation from constant to automatic to smooth out the motion.

3. Use the graph editor to adjust the motion and timing.

4. Add extra keys to fix certain issues and add extra detail to the animation.

In all of my older animations, I normally just used auto clamping for my interpolation type and didn't bother with the graph editor or anything like that -- but I've been finding that it really helps when it comes to zeroing in certain kinds of motion and just helping with the animation process in general.

Another thing which has been a HUGE help with this particular animation was Blender's built-in NLA editor. I've talked about this a little bit in the past, but I'll talk about it more here, as my approach to using it has changed since my last animation.

The main thing which this editor allows you to do is to make individual actions and then put those actions together like clips in a video editor. It also allows you to non-destructively tweak an animation by blending it with another animation, such as getting a character's head to look around during a walk cycle.

There are two things which I didn't know before, however.

Firstly, I didn't know how to blend between different clips in the NLA editor, and as a result of that, if I wanted to have merge multiple actions into one, I'd have to take each one and then copy paste the keyframes into one long and giant action. This is the approach I took with Mud Wrath. And while that works just fine, it's also really unwieldy to work with.

Too many keyframes!

But recently I've learned how to layer clips on top of each-other and blend between them, which means that I can combine the stages after the fact but leave the actions as they are without having to copy them all into a new one. I was worried that blending between the clips would cause some problems with the animation, but really it works so smoothly that I can't imagine myself trying to animate longer animations any other way, lol.

Infinite blending possibilities.

Secondly, I never knew how to "tweak" actions in the NLA editor. You see, in Blender you make your animation, and then once it's made you can "push it down" onto the NLA editor to be used like a video clip. The only problem with this is that once it's in the NLA, the keyframes are no longer available for you to work with.

Now in the NLA editor, you can tweak clips, which pulls up the keyframes for that particular clip and allows you to modify them as you like. I used to think this feature was completely broken, because when you select an NLA clip's keyframes in the timeline, if your clip isn't at the very start of the timeline, then it doesn't recognise your cursor's location and will instead select the totally wrong frame or nothing at all.

So for a long time I never tweaked actions. If I wanted to modify an animation in some way, I'd delete the action from the NLA editor, reapply the action to the armature, make the changes, then push it back to the editor, then try and realign it with all the other clips. It was a really time consuming and inefficient process, and it made longer animations like this extremely difficult -- almost impossible -- to achieve.

Anyway, I found out that if you use the dope sheet instead of the timeline, you can tweak actions and select keyframes just fine, lol. And that has saved me an IMMENSE amount of time while working on this. I can just keep things in the NLA editor and fix them on the fly; it's perfect.

Aside from that, most of the time it's taken to create this animation has been because of December (and January so far) being really busy, and me not having as much time to devote to this as I'd like. Also, it being the longest animation I've done, it's taken a lot of time and effort to get it to all come together.

Now, I'd usually wait a week and release the animation onto e621, but because it's so close to the end of the month and I don't want any new patrons to get double charged at the beginning of next month, I may wait until next month before this animation goes public. So, y'all get it two weeks early instead of the usual one, lol.

In the meantime, I'll be working on getting an exclusive angle of this rendered. I'll also start writing about (and posting pictures of!) my new character models, as I said I'd be doing that about three months ago now, lol. So I'll have something to show you of that fairly soon.

Until then, stay tuned, and thanks for all your support! :D