"Beware the Well of Shade, for the shadows run deep through its endless walls and twisting caverns" I've been messing around with this rig on and off for awhile, but I finally finished this little side project making a short scene in the style of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I've never been quite happy with how Starswirl the Bearded looked in the show when he finally appeared but, last year I happened upon a really cool fan design of Starswirl by the user Orin311 that I fell in love with. I decided to make a one view puppet rig this year directly based off their vector art as a surprise, complete with show style lip sync and a full walk cycle. One thing led to another in adding a background, a few illustrator texture brushes, multiple sound effects, re-purposing some old fire animation of mine and suddenly it became a whole completed scene. With such a cool wizard design, the choice for using Gandalf's voice to test the rig with was a no brainier. The background is based on the Well of Shade location in the Season 7 finale of MLP. I had a lot of fun making this and it was great practice for some future personal animation projects I wanna start next year! Credits for the character design and sound effects listed below

Starswirl fan design by Orin331 Lord of the Rings audio fire audio rocks and pebble audio magic effect audio horse walking audio

Animation tests of my Pomni Rig!! She is very very unfinished.. but at least some parts are

What 5 hours of puppet rigging does to a man (that's me I'm the man)

cable started as a character i had to make for an animation class, so here he is in his og fit ✨

— my dnd oc, cable (he/they)

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can I see your verison of, Bishop Lamb?

beloved beheaded :>

I'm curious and I want to know yall in the fandom better!

What are your day jobs? 💚

I like never draw him like this its so weird to me... he's so skinny...

Romeo exports/imports with his body rig fine but I like to clown around with auto rig. Totally an accident but just the way his lip curls like that made me so sad HE'S SO MAD AT ME and that's valid

also funtime freddy. bonbon has been killed

Also, I've made my first puppet and animation with Toonboon.

I know I promised this in the past, but I really do wanna do some art streams showing people how I build and use animation puppet rigs. Not having an upgraded PC yet is certainly hindering that, but I still wanna do it when that finally happens! I love building puppet rigs and I don't really get to talk to many people about the process outside of like a handful of friends and I know how frustrating it is trying to look up how things like 2D rigs are made when you're curious and wanna learn. Plus it'll help me start on my next personal project after MSA video 5 in making a bunch of character rigs for a short animation I've wanted to make since like 2013.

she's all coming together :]

remembering when i made a 3d model of orel puppington *laughs*

my exact thoughts on disenchanted

I understand the technology limitations are physically insurmountable, but both avatar 2 and god of war 2 - two motion capture top dogs in their respective mediums right now - are still struggling with the most important type of action you can ask to depict and perform in storytelling, and that is hugs. I'm nitpicking but it's been fucking decades by now, come on. hugs are so intrinsically human, tied intimately with moments of catharsis, are the purest expression of joy and love and yet in these technological marvels I can just always see it, plain as day. The tilting faces away from each other on approach - so the camera rigs don't bump; the laying heads on shoulders while looking away instead of gripping tight and burying them in one another's shoulders; and the awkward wide-berth separation moment to, again, make sure the crane rigs don't collide. It's this rigid pantomime of rehearsed choreography instead of a moment of reckless abandon and joy. And isn't that the whole point of mocap, to capture imperfect humanity? I would stomach it too if it wasn't so painfully noticeable almost every time. It's been decades. You get the odd keyframed moment of a kiss or a headbump but the hugs, dear god they have to figure something out about the hugs. I can't think of a more important type of action to refine in performance capture and no one seems to give a shit?? I understand facial capture is important but maybe fuck it for those moments? keyframe a few seconds for the sake of some honest emotion on-screen? I dunno man at this point it really feels like that is the keystone keeping mocap from being taken seriously as a dramatic tool. We need fierce hugs!

tl;dr: I am comically salty that mocap-based cinematics/films cannot get over awkward hugs because they insist on constantly recording facial capture with head-mounted rigs that hilariously limit actors' means of approaching anything within 2 feet and visibly stunt their spacial awareness when interacting in intimate scenes, essentially compromising some tiny part of the whole that can be picked up really instinctively by anyone watching in the audience. Ergo, we think cartoons, not people. It's just kinda regrettable after all this time

These are gonna be stupidly complicated, huh