UnderFes Banners Overview
For my few non-ripper followers basically because Undertale turned 10 years old this September and it's so important to ripping, VvvvvaVvvvvvr dedicated the whole month to Undertale rips, with tangentially-related sub-events. The event was called UnderFes, with the name and premise sort of being a riff on an old SiIvaGunner event called SummerFes, which was themed after Summer and had tangentially-related sub-events. (Get it?) As part of this event, we changed the YouTube banner several times, and now with the event being over the main point of this post is that I am going to talk about the banners that I created for the event.
To get things started, this was the initial concept image that I put together in 30 seconds during a VC:
This looks basically exactly like the Ruins banner.
Though I ended up deciding to create an extra banner for specifically the first room of the game to use before the main Ruins one.
This is the only time we'll see front-facing Vavr.
The Vavr sprites I did not make, they are reused from Vvvvvatale.
This banner along with the main one for the Ruins were as simple as finding a map for the Ruins, adding the Vvvvvatale sprites and then centering it.
Here's the main banner. It just kind of conveniently works out that there's already a long straight hallway in the Ruins so I didn't have to do anything.
Here is the first banner that actually took some effort. I got the tiles off of the Spriters Resource as well a some of the random scenery. This doesn't exactly represent any particular room, it's just supposed to be a hodgepodge of Snowdin-related imagery. That's the main philosophy I went with for these banners.
Before the Mr. Bean sprite was done I just added this second walking Vavr as a placeholder.
After creating this banner, I realized doing it all in an image editor would be too annoying and I had to look up some tile map tools.
This is sort of based on the room where the bird carries you over a disproportionately small gap, since it's the room with the most tile variants but it's not 1:1 or anything.
I couldn't find any tile mappers that weren't also kind of annoying to use so I ended up using them only for the base ground tiles, then adding the scenery on after.
I didn't add the characters, so peep added them in for me. Well that turned out to be a mistake, since he doesn't know how to scale pixel art properly. However, if you're eagle-eyed you will have already noticed that I made the Waterfall banner 1x instead of 2x like literally every other banner. Yeah so in the midst of figuring out the tilemapper I just used the banner dimensions without remembering at any point that it was supposed to be 2x, which means the version of this banner with the characters looks even worse. So yeah, I just screwed up everything with this one.
A fun detail with this one was the Gaster door. Obviously I wanted to include it as one of the most notable Waterfall landmarks, I decided to put it up against the water where it'd be logically inaccessible.
I didn't make the Waterfall castle banner, so we'll skip that and go right to Hotland. From here on out I made sure to get everything right so there shouldn't be any screwups, aside from the fact that almost every banner after had its last revision done like the day before it went up.
The first pass of Hotland. I extended the Mettaton fake kitchen to add this poster of Mettaton that appears in another room. I was thinking about adding Fuku Fire and/or Gaster Followers, before I remembered that for some reason I decided it'd be better to not use any of the NPCs from the areas in the banners and only use the scenery. Because of that the only characters we see besides the ones representing the sub-events are the ones that were depicted in-universe (Mettaton's poster here, and the statue of Tem in the previous banner). I think that was probably the right move but I could see the argument for otherwise.
Final version of Hotland with the characters now that I'm adding them myself to make sure there are no mixels. Again, I did not make the character sprites, they were made by others. Here you can see I moved the Mettaton poster to the opposite side, this is because the edge of the kitchen was in the area visible on mobile and I figured it would make more sense if the Mettaton poster was visible instead of just the edge of the kitchen. Another detail is the brick with glue, this is basically because the Hotland banner was used starting with WayneradioTV Day, and an actual Wayne fan suggested I add the brick with glue from one of his videos, which I figured it's simple enough to sprite (and it was).
Also, just for fun I threw in this unused sprite for a higher part of the Core that was shown off in the Undertale art book. It still doesn't reach the top of the banner sadly but it's not like it matters since it's all in the unseen part of the banner anyway (welcome to Boundary Break). (technically, the whole banner can be seen if watching YouTube from a TV, but we never optimize for this and basically consider the top and bottom "unseen".)
Here's the one for the Core, which was actually kind of annoying to make due to the amount of tile variants. But there's not much else to say here, so moving on.
For New Home, I knew the Asgore castle view was basically required to be the basis of the banner but to keep up the gig of making it a hodgepodge of elements from the area I also added the furniture from the actual New Home part of it, recolored to match the colors. Also, the trash can featured on the right side is actually from New Home within Undertale Yellow which I just threw in since there wasn't much else to add and Undertale Yellow is generally cool.
I didn't do the Monika classroom banners so moving right to the Judgement Hall banners.
Alternate version of the Judgement Hall banner where the characters aren't shadowed out. This obviously doesn't look as cool which is why I never really considered this for use but I did render it out as I spent way too much time on the standing edits for the ones who didn't have them from the original spriters, before realizing I was just going to shadow them out anyway. (In fact, Steven's color sprite literally never got shown on the channel lol.) Main detail I'm sad about losing is that I had Monika looking at you instead of forward which I thought was a good detail.
Obviously later I added the front pillars + shadowed characters. In hindsight I probably should've aligned the top of this with the edge of the seen area of the banner instead of centering it but oh well.
For the Megalovania Day version of this banner I initially made an edit of Steven before being told I was just supposed to use Sans.
And here's the color version of that abomination...
Initial surface banner, I'm glad someone called this out as obviously being way too empty because I was almost too lazy to do it properly.
And yes, to extend the green I literally just scribbled.
Later but not final version. This was almost the final version, before Jerma got a proper back sprite, causing me to skuff together one for Wayne based on his front sprite. I did like how it paired Jerma and Wayne together as the only two not interested in the sunset, which is fitting because they're just guys and not fictional characters so they've probably seen a sunset before or something like that.
I redid the extended mountains to make the whole thing feel less empty as well as extending the clouds. I didn't want to interfere directly with the central part so that's why the clouds don't connect.
The three mountains on the left are actually just taken directly from the logo for one of my cherished PS2 games, Downhill Domination. You can tell because they look way better than whatever I was cooking on the right side lmao.
Also, an /r/place amogus is there next to Jerma because he's the sus guy. The amogus is still on the banner in the final version but I moved it to another spot, it's no longer next to Jerma since he's properly looking at the sunset squished between the others.
Here's the actual final version, and also the current banner on the channel since we haven't switched back yet.
And that's pretty much everything I wanted to talk about. UnderFes turned out great and these were fun to put together, so I just wanted to have a place to point out some random details and stuff. Peace out
