I Make Stuff I Think?

I have no idea how this stupid website works.

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And here is a short animation I made with the models, rendered in the Unreal Engine with a (crappy) custom cel shader I set up! I wanted to make a Play of the Game highlight intro for the characters, and while I don’t think it came out the best animation-wise, I am very happy that the animation rigs I created for them held up and transferred the animation to UE4 well.

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I took a character modeling class last Spring, and here are the results! The goal of the class was to take two pieces of concept art from the internet and turn them into a game-ready models. I found this piece from an artist by the name of Alexandra Douglass for a game called Gigantic and my teacher suggested I model both characters. It was challenging trying to match the style, which I wanted to do to a greater degree than the existing models of these characters, and I’m happy with what I managed to create!

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This semester I’m taking a sculpting class which utilizes ZBrush, and my professor told me that I need to practice using the program outside of class much more than I’d previously been (read: not at all). So over the past few days, I decided to model my simultaneously favorite Steven Universe character and OTP, Garnet! I still need to fix up her gems because they’re surprisingly difficult to do for some reason, and I should probably try working on her eyes some more so potential animators could have her take off her visor if they want.

If enough people are interested, I could try modeling the other gems as well, or I could continue working on Garnet and see if I could get her properly rigged for animation!

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Hoo boy, this was a big one! I started working on this around mid November, and just barely finished it today. I learned a ton about making a whole animated story from scratch, and if I ever decide to do this again instead of making parody videos (which I plan to do for a while until I can regain my sanity), hopefully things won't go as roughly. 

For example, I thought that it would be a good idea to use Source Filmmaker to storyboard the film out. I still think it's a good idea, but now I know it's a bad idea to try to immediately turn that storyboard into an animation without bothering to time things properly the first time around. I threw any sense of timing or pacing to the wind when I roughed out the incredibly basic poses and shots starting out, and it came back to bite me in the butt when I had to constantly lengthen or shorten said shots during the blocking phase.

Another thing I learned is that you'll want to have a good idea of how long your animation is going to be from the start, and to make sure to plan out what models you think you'll need throughout most of the animation. There were countless times that I had to go into a shot and look for the animation set for a model which ended seconds or even minutes earlier than the shot began, all because I didn't think this thing was going to be four friggen minutes and I started blading my shots before I put the main characters in.

On a more positive side of things, I got to put my short-lived days of map-making (back when Portal 2 came out and it was all the rage) to use by modifying the Five Nights at Freddy's map in Hammer, tearing out all the lights. I'd never worked in a totally lightless map before, and I was very tempted to put in the lighting before I was finished with the animation. Working in fullbright mode wasn't easy on the eyes, but it was worth it when I went and put all the lights in and suddenly everything looked cool and dynamic though! Although it doesn't make any sense, I really loved putting lights beneath the characters near the end (where the animatronics are fed up and mob the Pyro into a corner). It looks very pretty when used right, like in Majora's Mask (the N64 version anyway): 

Going back to ranty-complainy problems, the whole of the animation portion of this video was a downright treat in comparison to the tedium that was the sound design. There are few things more frustrating than imagining that perfect sound effect to go with this action only to realize that you can't find it anywhere. Or worse, you CAN find it but not unmolested by other sounds or horrid quality. I'm very glad that I managed to scrounge enough sound effects to make this video okay, but there are a lot of places that I wish I could've done better.

Working with a video editor program--of which this was my first time--isn't very fun, either. If you do your sound design in Source Filmmaker, remember not to take for granted the ability to effortlessly add multiple sounds on top of one another. In Adobe Premiere, you have to create a new friggen track to do that, so if you have a single scene with seven sounds playing at once, then you've got seven tracks to put audio clips onto for the rest of the video and you have to organize them all manually. The only thing Premiere has over SFM in terms of sound editing (as far as my knowledge and skill with the program go) is the ability to keyframe a track's volume as well as make a track louder than the default (for some reason in SFM you can't set an audio clip's volume greater than 1.0 to my knowledge, which is incredibly annoying if you have a really quite sound that you want to boost).

But even Premiere's frustrations were a good learning experience. Working with sound aside, it allows for pipelines that make it nice and simple to redo a shot or time things a bit differently without worrying about messing with the entire rest of the video, so it's not hard to go back and forth between it and Source Filmmaker for whatever I need.

So that's what I've been doing these past three or so months. It took forever and was pretty grueling at times, but I learned a ton and made a cool little animation out of it! Hopefully it'll be a bit easier the next time around.

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When I noticed my subscriber count went past 9,000, I debated with myself whether or not to make a video for it. On the one hand, the Over Nine Thousand meme has been done to death, but on the other, I've been working on my big project for so long that taking a break to poop out this video turned out to be a lot of fun! Plus my sense of humor is stupid enough that I find this kind of crap to be super funny, even while I'm making it, so keeping myself laughing as I go is a huge bonus.

Also, Christ you people are quick on the draw when it comes to finding Golden Freddy. He is visible in this video for only three frames, but within a few hours of posting it, someone pinpointed where he was and when he appears! I am going to really have to step up my game when it comes to hiding him in future videos, just you people wait.

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If this video has taught me anything ever it is that sound designers don't get paid enough. I have no idea how much the industry pays them but whatever it is, it isn't freaking enough.

While it's nice that SFM supports basic sound editing, the program also very clunky with it. To change the volume of a sound, you have to open up a dialogue box and manually type in a number, and unless I'm missing something, sounds cannot go above volume 1 so if you want to make one sound louder than all the others, you have to turn down all the freaking others. And while you can select multiple sounds at a time and change their volume en masse, there's no way (that I currently know of) to increment their volume so sounds at different volumes stay at different volumes, even if you raise or lower it for both of them.

Even then, you'll find that even with TF2's and HL2's enormous library of sound effects, you can never quite find the one sound you're looking for. It took forever to composite a passable tumbling sound for Freddy's roll at the end, and even in the final video I'm not very satisfied with it. 

So treat your sound guys right, people, because you'll only notice how easy they make it look by experiencing how hard it is to do.

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So Steven Universe and Five Nights at Freddy's are woefully estranged when it comes to crossovers, and I intend to alleviate that a little. This joke brought me to tears when I first saw it in the show, so I just had to remake it with the FNaF gang (and lo and behold, the characters fit rather nicely!).

Fun fact: I had this made and almost totally finished for around a month or two. However, I just couldn't bring myself to post it unless I could voice Mike, and I unfortunately wasn't able to do that until I received a microphone for Christmas.

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I never thought I'd get so much attention when I first made Foxy Does the Hustle, nor did I think I'd ever get 5,000 subscribes so soon with just a couple videos. The internet can seem like a cruel and uncaring place at times, but it's easy to forget that there are just so many people out there that there's always going to be someone who likes what you do, so long as you have the courage to put it out there for them to find.

I figured that it would be fitting to celebrate my newfound subscriber count by making another FNaF/Futurama mashup, since it was one that rekindled my interest in animation in the first place. Animating this was a lot of fun, as the motion was very simple and it allowed me to play around with everyone's expressions (I also stand by that Foxy is the cutest freaking thing ever and no amount of FNaF canon will ever change that.). I'm considering making more of these short clips in between larger projects, as FNaF and Futurama have a lot of characters that mesh really well with one another (mostly Foxy as Fry but I think I could find places for the others as well) and they're fun and simple to churn out.

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I'll try not to say things in these posts that I haven't already said in the description of the video. To that end, I've already voiced most of my thoughts on this one.

One thing I haven't said, however, is how much I hate the lighting here. I was really lazy with it and it definitely shows. For my future animations, I'm going to challenge myself by using unlit maps whenever possible. I think lighting is incredibly important in animation, and you can do some amazing things with it in Source Filmmaker, so I'm going to try to put as much effort into it as I can from now on.

Also, animating them all bobbing like that was hella fun.

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Eheheheheheheheheheheheheheh.

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Compared to my previous video, this animation was both easier and harder in a way. I'd gotten much more comfortable at posing the characters and picking out good keyframes, but at the same time, it was a pain copying the frames from the original video.

As it turns out, the Quicktime Player (the only freaking video player I could find that lets you see a freaking timestamp goddammit) is poop and makes it so audio only has a passing relationship with the video. For example, frame 114 in the Quicktime player wouldn't have audio in the same place as frame 114 in Source Filmmaker, even though frames 2 or 10 match in both. When I got everything keyed in, I had to go back and move a ton of keyframes around to retime everything to make the audio match up again. I think it was a good experience, though, since in my future videos I've moved past copying animation directly from somewhere else and had to time everything myself.

One of the more frustrating things I had to deal with was Freddy's freaking waterbending. As you can see in the final version of the video, rather than an amorphous glob of the stuff like they bend in the show, he has a dinky oversized teardrop instead. That was the closest I could get, and I couldn't even light the thing up to make it look more like water. I spent a good amount of time trying to lock lights to it to make it look nice, but I could never get it to where the light shone on the water the whole time but not on Freddy himself. After a while I just gave up and left it as is.

On more positive things, however, it was fun working with particles to have Bonnie firebend. I really liked working with the lights to make the fire glow, and I think it turned out nicely. Foxy's airbending particles were a challenge to find, but I think they got the point across as well.

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This was much more difficult to animate than the Hustle video, even though I still copied the frames from the original. The inspiration for it came from the same place as the last one; I thought it would be cool to see the FNaF gang crossed over with Avatar. It works really well, too; four animatronics (I consider Golden Freddy to be like a subset of Freddy), four elements, and a line security guards to bend them all.

I had briefly considered doing the whole opening, but if I did I would have to record a new version of the narration, because I will not stand to have no narration or for the narration not to match up with the video. Also it would have been very difficult to do all of the outdoor scenes without either having to make them all in one map or splicing different clips on different maps together while also trying to keep it synced to the audio. Plus, as it turned out, just doing the opening bit was difficult and time-consuming enough as it was, although playing around with volumetric lights to get the red background was a ton of fun.

At the time of writing, across the video and the gifs I posted on my DeviantArt page, I've had people cumulatively suggest that every animatronic should bend almost every other element than the ones I've given them in the video. The only suggestion I haven't gotten so far is that Foxy should be an earthbender. Everything else, though, is fair game. I've posted my reasoning behind their elements on various places, but I'll share them here as well for completeness.

Freddy makes a good waterbender, because he is able to adapt to the player's strategy and turn the other animatronics' tactics on their head. He is fluid and adaptable, and prefers to stick to the shadows much like waterbenders draw strength from the moon. Additionally, Golden Freddy makes for a great a psychic bloodbender, able to gruesomely kill the player without even having to move.

I feel that Chica would most likely be an earthbender. She is the slowest of the animatronics, visiting the player's door much less often than Bonnie. However, she tends to stand her ground and linger at the player's door for longer than Bonnie as well. The way she clumsily bumbles about the kitchen also gives off a few earthbender vibes.

Bonnie fits the characteristics of a firebender pretty well. He visits the player's door often throughout the night but leaves quickly, just as firebenders tend to focus on rapid attack-and-retreat methods of fighting.

Lastly, I feel like Foxy makes a good airbender, and not just because the other three elements are taken. Along with the obvious trait that he can run like the wind, he is also very different from the other animatronics similar to how the air nation was very different from the other nations. They're both isolated from the other three, and they go about things very differently from them as well. Lastly, Foxy is much smaller and leaner than the other animatronics, so he'd benefit greatly from the increase agility that airbending gives.

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This is an early animation pass for Foxy Does the Hustle. The Animation WIPs playlist I put all of these in doesn't seem to get a lot of love (all of the videos in it are unlisted, anyway), so I think here would be a good place to help more people see them if they're interested.

There's not much to say about this one in particular. You may notice that Mike isn't wearing his guard uniform. It was actually pretty tricky getting him one; the only guard models (that weren't also policemen) I could find didn't work properly in SFM; for some reason, their faces had a checkerbox texture superimposed over them and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to fix it. Instead, I worked around it by shrinking the guard model's head and putting the working Mike's in its place. I'm really lucky that Bender didn't move at all in this scene, because I could not animate both the head and the body together without breaking all the scaling screwery on both of them.

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OKAY SO APPARENTLY I CAN'T POST GIFS UNLESS THEY'RE RIDICULOUSLY TINY so I guess I'll just post the videos themselves here.

This is my first popular Source Filmmaker video! I tried Source Filmmaker when it came out two years ago and made a few other weird videos with it, but I eventually dropped it because I felt animating was too difficult and messy. However, one day, I came across this video by Jesse Baumgartner, showing a very simple blocking pass for one of his (really fantastic) animations. That inspired me to try animating that way, using the Graph Editor to key in poses instead of mashing everything together with the Motion Editor.

I remembered Fry's native dance from Futurama, and thought it would be funny to see Foxy doing it instead, so I downloaded the clip from youtube and went through it frame-by-frame to copy Fry's key poses in SFM. Lo and behold, once I had enough poses in, when I smoothed it, the animation came out great!

It is really fantastic seeing an animation come together. It can be very tedious to go through and pose the models over and over, but watching a scene slowly evolve from jittery key poses to stop-motion-like movement to fluid animation is just magical, and worth every second spent on it.

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Okay so I think I got a good layout going. I guess I can post gifs of my animations here? Though it's probably a bit late for some of them. Ah well, I'll post 'em anyway. At least I know I'm the source.

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I have no idea how this works.