Bunsen Introduction - Playblast (Patreon)

Hoh boy, this animation was quite something! I admittedly needed to start over with this after thinking I was just able to animate a dragon walking out of my head, oop! Fortunately there's a decent amount of reference material out there that helped me getting the movement of his legs and torso right, which were quite a bit more challenging to animate than I thought.

Luckily there's only very few scenes in this animation that require detailed animation of Bunsen's entire body, as I realized early on that his many limbs and controllers take a lot longer to animate than any regular humanoid character. Big kudos to NuttyMrGecky for the amazing rig, though! I'm hoping to get in touch with him some time next month to show him some gratitude!

I'm expecting progress to speed up quite a bit in the upcoming weeks and that we reach the nommy bits quite soon. My side project is finally completed, which means I'll have no more distractions for the next two months and can fully focus on animating. 

Note that in the recent weeks I finally managed to find a voice actor for Bunsen who will lend our dragon his voice in this animation. He goes under the name Darkwitt and has lent his voice to many audio plays by Caudle, if you're familiar with their work. Darkwitt also does sound design and will likely take care of doing the sound in my future animations. He previously did the sound design for Hazbin Hotel, which I always found sounded excellent, so it's needless to say he's perfect for the job! It also takes some more work off my shoulders, as I've previously done all these things on my own.

Note that the Halloween animation won't be finished for Halloween, as there's still a lot to animate. I probably would've needed to skip the previous two mini animations to make the date, but I felt like I first needed a bit of practice with Bunsen's rig, as well as with Redshift, as this will be the first major animation that will use the new renderer. I'm hoping to have the animation finished somewhere around Christmas, but I might want to extend the vorish play by another scene, so I'll have to see how progress is going throughout the next weeks!

Chloé Reconsiderations

I had originally planned to have Chloé rigged this month, but after Autodesk required me buy a pricey second Maya license for 3 years, I needed to move these plans back towards the end of 2023 as I wanted to pay a professional rigger for this endeavor and money is currently a little tighter than expected due to a lot of unexpected bills throughout the recent months. This might however be a blessing in disguise, as this got me to think about the new model a little more and ultimately got me to the conclusion that Chloé would work much better as a completely new character, rather than a sister to Zoe who looks somewhat akin to her. Zoe will likely get another revision next year, but this time the changes to her model will only be very subtle and mostly just fix the issues the old model has.

To this day, I'm still receiving messages about bringing back the jackal character from one of my oldest animations. Sadly this isn't quite possible, as the character originally belonged to an old friend who had left the furry community, which is why I can't just reuse the design as it was. I've however been thinking about having a more anubian-style jackal character for the longest time (dark fur with yellow/golden accents), as the aesthetic always really appealed to me. And considering Chloé's side profile looks a lot more jackal than fox-like already, her model could be perfect for a character design like this. I had already planned to have a future Encounter episode play out in an Egyptian setting, and the thought of Space Hero fighting Chloépatra, the large anubian goddess is quite appealing to me, hah!

With my schedule freeing up again next month, I should definitely find some time to work on Chloé again. So far I've done a couple of tests of how she'd look with dark fur, and I have to say it suits her quite well. Once I have a few more updates on the model next month, I'll make sure to give you guys an update! :)