Face Slurp Playblast & Teleport VFX (Patreon)

Even after all this time animating, I still get the occasional sequence I struggle with and in this case it was something rather simple like Chloé leaning herself down over the viewer. While I got it to look good in third person, it somehow looked off from the POV perspective. I was able to fix it by exaggerating the movements and making them a lot snappier, which in turn made it look weird in third person, but right from a POV angle. Well, I think I'm going to keep it like that!

Looks like we're finally getting to the good stuff! Chloé has decided to "punish" the viewer for spying by sucking on your face a little, oh no~! This seemed like a good moment to show off her extended gullet and its rig as well. Everything can now be animated, which makes her maw look more dynamic than ever. I've added a plethora of blend poses to her tongue as well, so it can morph between various shapes. There's also some additional sculpt deformers at work here, which are using Maya's new-ish component tags, but the use of them is fairly subtle here, as the excellent mouth rig that was provided by Disregard already enabled me to animate it with a high level of polish!

Most of the intro scenes have already finished rendering, so I can also give you a preview of what the rendered animation is going to look like!

This also shows Chloé's teleportation VFX, which was achieved using nParticles with a decent amount of per-opject motion blur. Since she's desert-themed djinn character, I wanted her teleportation to look like a burst of sand that then reassembles in the same manner. We're only going to see it twice in this animation, while in Encounter 3 it's going to be used quite often for her to move in and out of the shot! :D

Note that the next playblast might be a bit late, as I'm first going to polish up the sequence shown here to have it render over night. I lately try to get a lot of the rendering done during the animation phase since it has gotten a lot more time consuming with these new path-traced visuals.