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!
if I had a dollar for every time one of my friends sent me this post asking “is this you” I would have enough money to buy a really awesome six scoop ice cream. WITH sprinkles
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream but with 60 clones of the same guy
I've been loving the hell out of Living the Dream and I've always had one Mii who I absolutely adore. If you've ever seen my account, you know who I'm talking about considering I draw him all the time; Quit!!!!
^ here he is on my main island.
So I decided I wanted to run an experiment: I would make an alt save with 60 of the same Mii. Every single Mii will be a clone of our beloved Quit (seen above) with the exact same personality, voice, face, dating preferences (all Quits can date all 3 gender options), everything. The only difference is that 20 of them are male, 20 are female, and 20 are nonbinary (because I'm curious on if Mii gender impacts how a Mii forms friends).
It was a lengthy process making 60 of the exact same Mii, but finally...
Welcome to Quitland.
My general rule for this save file is that I must interfere as little as possible with the Quits lives. I'll only give them food, new clothing, treasures, or new housing if they directly ask me for it. I can't force any relationships either (barring the tutorial which forces you to do so). I want to see how these 60 clones all grow and adapt, and how they will eventually differentiate themselves.
I had put all 60 Quits in at midnight so right after doing so I decided to head to bed. I then proceeded to spend the chunk of my morning doing quite possibly the stupidest thing ever:
Creating a giant pixelated Quit to put on the ground.
From there I learned about something kind of interesting. Turns out when you create 60 Miis all at once, with all of them having no little quirks, friends, or really anything to define their AI past their basic personality, they become...
...kind of stupid.
Here are some examples of small groups of Quit randomly choosing to follow one "leader" Quit for no reason. They REALLY enjoy doing this. Its not uncommon for small packs of Quit (usually containing 2-6 members) to just stalk another Quit for extended periods of time. I believe they are developing pack-hunting strategies. This scares me.
They also enjoyed talking. A lot. My entire island is just constantly full of random Quit chatter 24/7.
I'll admit though it is very rewarding just seeing all of them standing about, doing weird Quit things. I feel like a proud father of 60 single-celled organisms.
Also I got quite possibly the funniest Tomodachi Life clip I've ever seen:
There ain't a single brain cell between any of them. Honestly it was really fun just watching them frolic about, like an ant farm made entirely up of brainless homunculus.
In terms of actual development between the Quits, some of them became acquaintances and a few even became friends, but the REAL development was between Quit 1 (known as Original Quit) and Quit 3:
Quit 3 started crushing on Original, and just a few minutes after that Quit 3 surprised me by deciding to just up and confess to Original. This was pretty shocking...so far, every other Quit has been fairly reserved in making relationships. While plenty of them became "like-minded" (not surprising considering they all have the same mind), few were brave enough to become friends, let alone lovers. Perhaps Quit 3 is some kind of deviant Quit???
Well lucky for Quit 3, their boldness ended up paying off...and Quitland got its first couple!
I wonder how long it'll last...
Besides that, only one other romantic event happened. Which was Quit 48 developing a crush on Quit 28. (I know it's hard to tell that this Quit is different from the Quit above...but trust me, its a different guy.)
...could this be considered an example of egomania...? I mean they look identical...
And that was about everything interesting that happened on day 1 of my little experiment. I might post more if anyone has any interest in the Quit ant farm. This is a little different from what I usually post so hopefully the people who follow me just for the art don't mind a bit of a change lol. To end off, here's some group pictures after I finally unlocked the photo mode:
Personally I'm a really big fan of chicken Quit right now.