Hey, Honey! (Patreon)

This post will remain accesible for all patrons. The downloadable version will be posted seperately.

About the new animation

I’ve always wanted to do something inspired by this character, since she fits so perfectly into our little niche corner of the internet. I needed to get more practice with lip-syncing and head movement so I decided to make an animation out of it, rather than just more test-renders.

Out of respect for the actress and the material I chose to make this more family friendly than normal. This will also be the first animation that I won’t be releasing to everyone, since it’s a test-animation rather than a full blown “commercial” one, so to speak. Like other test renders, this will be a Patreon exclusive. Just for you guys!

About the new technique

I think the MoCap works very well here. Mostly, I’m happy with the slight head-movements and timing (which is very hard to get right with key-framing). What I learned is that the MoCap is more of a guide or tool than an all encompassing solution. I still need to clean up the data quite a bit before it is usable and add an overlaying framework of expressions and lip- and tongue movement before it looks natural.

This was a very important milestone for me, as proof of concept. It will allow for characters to act and express themselves fully, to communicate what they do and feel, and make it all look way more realistic.

I’ve also brought up the render quality to remove some of the “grain” I had in Force Feeding and previous animations. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without the beastly 3000-series graphics cards. I also tried out some hand-held camera jitter, which I think looks cool and adds to the realism.

Alternative story-line

I had many different ideas for this one to begin with. There was one however that I scripted out fully that was scrubbed in favour of the one I made. It goes something like this:

We start of the same, in the middle of the day in a busy big city. This time, our hero is fighting some low-level female villain. The villain has some form of handheld weapon capable of hurting the hero (a glowing electrical batton, I imagined). Our hero shrinks but gets hit mid-air by the weapon, breaking her wings so that she falls to the ground. The villain tries to step on her and finally slams the glowing batton on the ground, sending our hero into a nearby wall, knocking the wind out of her and turning her back to her normal human size.

The villain approaches, raises the weapon and strikes, but the hero manages to lift her arm and grab the villain by the wrist. The villain then leans in over the crouched hero, putting all her weight behind the weapon, forcing its glowing tip closer and closer towards the hero’s face, who’s struggling to hold it back. It looks like our hero will lose.

We then see the hero’s hand, wrapped around the villain’s wrist, start to slowly grow in size. The villain looks startled and pushes harder but the hero grits with determination. The hand grows even more, as does the rest of the hero lying underneath the villain. The villain cries out in pain as the crushing grip around her arm forces her to drop the weapon.

The hero continues to grow, until she lifts the villain’s feet off the ground, and grows until the villain is dangling by the wrist, several stories up in the air, by the hero’s now gigantic fingers.

There would then be some short exchange of dialogue, where the villain submits and asks to be taken to jail. Instead the hero responds by dropping her into her mouth and swallowing her whole and alive.

The hero would then shrink to normal size and talk to the civilians who had been watching the showdown. She would triumphantly claim, while patting her belly, that she had saved them from the evil super-villain. One of the civilians would then reply, with a morbid expression, that it wasn’t some super-villain. A meter-maid would add, wile holdin up a piece of paper, that the woman was just upset that she had gotten a parking ticket and they were about to resolve the issue. That she didn’t take the taser out of her purse until the hero showed up and attacked her.

The hero looks at them, shocked and embarrassed. An involuntary little burp escapes her lips before she quickly shrinks and escapes the scene.

As you can imagine, this would have been a bit much to animate, so I chose a shorter, simpler version, more focused on what I actually needed to practice doing.

Summery

This was easily one of the most fun animations to do. I felt super inspired all the way through and I think the end result, however, short, shows what awaits in future content!

Enjoy!