WWW#47 (Patreon)

TL;DR: I am animating and rendering like crazy, and I started modeling XJ9 in addition

In norwegian we have a saying, it goes: Ny dag, nye nederlag. Directly translated it means "New day, new defeats", though it's more like "feeling defeated". Life, you know? 

So I've rendered this Beej sequence a million times now because at first I rendered it without checking, and the lights were way too dim. Then I rendered with blue lights shining on Helen but they were way too bright and I didn't realize until after rendering. Then I rendered again but something went wrong and the renderfarm used the wrong light strength for the last 50 frames in the sequence. Then I re-rendered those 25 frames, + some random frames that were skipped by the farm. I managed to make a change in the light in between rendering so there's a slight cut to where the light looks different. Here:

Long story short I am tired as hell and am considering just going with the first or second version, since at least they at least are consistent throughout...

I've also almost finished the f!ngering part and am nearing the P in V part now, excited! 

Lastly, I've gathered the poll is probably moving towards XJ9, so I've tried to get a head start on her design. Just sketching things out and discussing with other artists what the best approach would be so far. If Frankie or Amethyst turn out to win, I pretty much know how they'll end up, but XJ9 is a bit more of a challenge. 

Specifically, her mouth is gonna be the hard part. I think what I'll do, is try to go further into the stop motion aesthetic and make it so her mouth is just a flat shape on the surface. And then if she needs to do beejays, I can swap it out with something that has lips. We'll see how it works out!