It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
Something that has bothered me for a while now in the discussion surrounding Spamton's trans coding (or rather, the denial of it) is the idea that the dress mannequin can't represent anything negative because it would sully the meaning of The Dress itself as a symbol of freedom and self-acceptance. However, I think this argument fails to consider the idea that the dress and the dress mannequin are two different objects that represent two different things.
When talking about the meaning of the dress in this instance it's important to recognize that the dress can't be separated from the mannequin, both contextually and literally.
They are a package deal. The dress is permanently attached to the mannequin and must be analyzed with this context in mind. The dress being unobtainable on its own and instead being affixed to the mannequin makes this item inherently different from the dress in Undertale.
In Undertale, the dress is wearable. It's free to be given or taken with nothing to get in the way of that. In Deltarune, the mannequin flips this aspect of freedom on its head. The dress is unable to be taken off the mannequin or given to anyone else. The choice is taken away and the object is rendered useless.
The mannequin represents a lack of choice in the ill-fitting roles imposed upon oneself by others, and I think chapter 5 bolsters this idea even more with Pink's comment about how it "doesn't fit" just like how Spamton won't fit into the mannequin in chapter 2. Conversely, Ralsei likes the dress, but would be unable to wear it because it is instead being forced onto someone who doesn't want it.
Perhaps the dress freed from the mannequin would not evoke these same negative reactions, but as it is right now, the dress mannequin is the opposite of the dress in Undertale and shows how forcing people into roles that don't fit is a detriment to everyone. And, in my opinion, this is extremely fitting for a game like Deltarune, where the statement we are challenging throughout the game is not "In this world, it's kill or be killed," but instead "No one can choose who they are in this world."
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