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!
Youtube Version | Bluesky Version
I have a three day weekend and with more audio of him popping up why not play?
Well this was fun. Time to play videogaaaames!
Much like my Spamton animation before I planned out the main story poses on my iPad. It’s a nice way to get ideas and keeps me away from my computer. Like I’ve said before, it’s hard to be on my computer after work hours. You just wanna get away from it.
Down side to this though is you don’t have instant playback of the audio, I would just play it in another tab now and again. When I imported the drawings into Toon Boom and started posing the rig I noticed some expressions were to strong, or some ideas didn’t really fit the rhythm of the dialogue as well as I would of liked.
It’s why in the long term it’s best to have that instant playback if you can, but drawing of the sofa away from a desk is toooo nice.
75. Percabeth -64
Percy Jackson & Annabeth Chase, the Percy Jackson universe
76. Hucklerobby
Dennis 'Huckleberry' Whitaker & Michael 'Robby' Robinavitch, The Pitt
77. Bunnydoll
Jax & Ragatha, The Amazing Digital Circus
78. Wangxian -25
Lan Wangji & Wei Wuxian, Mo Dao Zu Shi
79. Shadowpeach -19
Sun Wukong & the Six-Eared Macaque, Lego Monkie Kid
80. Eternalberry
Hollyberry Cookie & Eternal Sugar Cookie, the Cookie Run franchise
81. Odypen
Odysseus & Penelope, EPIC: The Musical
82. Mizisua
Mizi & Sua, Alien Stage
83. Sterek
Stiles Stilinski & Derek Hale, Teen Wolf
84. Shadowvanilla
Pure Vanilla & Shadow Milk, the Cookie Run franchise
85. Moshang
Mobei-Jun & Shang Qinghua, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
86. Spideypool
Spider-Man & Deadpool, the Marvel universe
87. Davekat 0
Dave Strider & Karkat Vantas, Homestuck
88. Heavymedic
Heavy Weapons Guy & Medic, Team Fortress 2
89. Lumax
Lucas Sinclair & Max Mayfield, Stranger Things
90. Sonamy
Sonic the Hedgehog & Amy Rose, Sonic the Hedgehog
91. Rookanis
Rook & Lucanis Dellamorte, Dragon Age: The Veilguard
92. Zoeystery
Zoey & Mystery, KPop Demon Hunters
93. Poolverine -90
Wade Wilson & Logan Howlett, the Marvel universe
94. Everlark -12
Katniss Everdeen & Peeta Mellark, The Hunger Games
95. Clois
Clark Kent & Lois Lane, Superman
96. Johnlock
John Watson & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock
97. Agathario -21
Agatha Harkness & Rio Vidal, the Marvel universe
98. Stolitz -64
Stolas & Blitzo, Helluva Boss
99. Devil's Minion
Armand & Daniel Molloy, Interview with the Vampire & The Vampire Chronicles
100. Skystar
Skyfire & Starscream, Transformers
The number in italics indicates how many spots a ship moved up or down from 2024. Bolded ships weren’t on the list last year.
*And, it turnes out we love pure vanilla x shadow milk so much, our data actually pulled it twice. Woops! We hope you enjoy nonetheless, and thank you for understanding❣️
How did your ships fare this week? Did your faves make the cut? Any surprises? Tag your posts and commentary with #ships week 2026 to keep this party going. Thanks for joining us. Now, go forth and keep doin what you're doin tumblr <3
I feel like people don’t really discuss Spamton’s postive character traits that often and some would think that I'm joking when I say that Spamton has a kind heart.
I genuinely believe that despite everything, he actually can be quite kind. I think his biggest positive trait is that he is at his core quite helpful. I think everyone knows this at this point, but during his first encounter fight: if you do actually press F1 for help, he does actually send a little angel version of himself to heal you.
But during the Spamton Sweepstakes Q&A, I noticed these particular entries:
He’s being giving pretty genuine answers, even offering advice on the elemental pairs. If you notice too, he also seems to be quite honest about his products being shit. He’s generally quite open about being a scammer. (Or maybe he’s just a terrible liar lol).
On a somewhat related tangent, I know there was a debate not that long ago over whether Spamton would support NFTs and AI. I think a lot of people were thinking too black and white when it came down to it. Like, yes, he would absolutely use these things but not because he necessarily believes in them or even cares about them. He only sees his products as a means to achieve his goals to becoming a big shot again. He knows they’re shit but doesn’t care because he is fueled so much by desperation.
I strongly believe he is like this because he feels like it’s a necessity towards achieving his freedom (which I think he is kind of naively equating success with freedom, perhaps there is another way to be free…?) and not because he wants to genuinely hurt someone, especially Kris who he can personally relate with. During the Spamton NEO fight, he is telling Kris that he ‘can’t force them’ and ‘won’t force them’ to give up his soul, which I think he’s doing out of some sort of denial of guilt over the fact that he knows he has to kill them to get it and knows that he is basically forcing them to agree.
Spamton made the biggest sacrifice to the lightners, turning himself into the Dealmaker/Puppet Scarf to help on their journey. He gave up his fight for freedom in order to give the kids his strength. I don’t know, but that seems like a very noble and selfless thing for him to do.
Even with Tenna’s contract, I do think he was actually wanting to help Tenna. Hell, Tenna knows the word ‘NEO’, which is very oddly specific. There’s a big chance that Spamton has talked about the NEO body to him as a way for them to both be big together. (This is more into theory territory, but fusion is a concept in the UTDR universe, specifically with Chara and Asriel. Also the fact that in the Undertale 10th anniversary stream, Spamton A. Spamton was able to transfer Spamton into the game with a floppy disc in the CRT…..are you picking up what I’m laying down here…..)
Someone pointed it on on here that in the Japanese version of the game, Tenna states something along the lines of Spamton saying he was ‘going to be right back’ before answering that one phone call, implying that his intention was never to run away and the only reason he did was because his life was clearly threatened in some way. Perhaps the only things holding him back from confidently signing that contract were 1) The Benefactor was clearly an intimidating and frightening figure that was controlling his life. Maybe he was even afraid of the benefactor also controlling Tenna’s life in a similar manner. 2) This may be more speculative, but maybe he felt like a fraud. I mean, before his big shot era, he was an unlucky and unseen addison. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that perhaps he felt insecure and unqualified to help Tenna, especially since the only reason he is successful is because of a mysterious phone caller.
Yes, Spamton is a scammer. He’s a fraud, deceitful, petty, and rude. But he has also been controlled and manipulated by some frightening higher power, thinks everyone abandoned him, driven mad, and discarded to live in a garbage can. But he also really wants to be useful and helpful to others because he knows what it’s like to be at the bottom. Come on, He was the face of a charity sweepstakes! (Technically twice, kind of!) I think anyone in that kind of situation would also have the worst brought out of them, especially if you feel like you need to be these things in order to survive. I think under all that pain, there’s an email guy who just wants to be happy and free, and now wants to live life to the fullest not just for himself, but for his friends too.
I know nothing of what I said was anything super groundbreaking, but I just really wanted to open up a conversation about this stuff because I find it all so fascinating. Spamton is such a great character and has so much depth to him than what meets the eye.
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
gracieabrams
origamiaround
