Been once again super busy with work lately, but found some time to sneak in getting this little project done!

I've recently changed up my profile pictures to use a character design that I can actually credit to myself! I will always love Leafeon and will miss using them as a profile picture, but the biggest problem with using them as a way to identify me is that they aren't really my character or my design. And my own iteration of Leafeon's model isn't that derivative anyway, nor would I really want it to. And also considering how long I've been a FiM fan, I think it's a long time coming that I finally make a design of a pony for myself to use as a sona!

With that said, when it comes to this model, I started working a bit on it a few months back. Mostly in the coat coloring and headshape department. The head topology is the same as before, but now I have controls in the rig that can change the head shape to feel more "stallion"-like. For how I tuned the shape for my character, he's kind of got a shape in-between a full on mare and stallion head shape.

Work ceased for a while as I got involved working on a project called "Billie Bust Up!" (which I will talk more about later if that got your attention, don't worry!). It's been very busy, but the past week I decided to sit down and get this done on my own time. I did a few streams where I would work continuously on my model, like getting all the hair done, and working on all the animation. You can find all the VODs to these in the Live section on my YouTube Channel. I really like doing livestreams, as it has a very VERY obvious affect on how I am able to focus, and makes working on things a lot easier and more efficient. I want to do them more again, I miss streaming a lot. Maybe for BBU I'll find a way, but only time will tell.

This animation was really fun to make. Haven't really done super dynamic quadruped animation since I was involved in the G5 pony game, so it was nice to get at it again to refresh my skills there. Didn't feel too hard, so that's a good sign I wasn't getting too rusty. And rendering was not nearly as bad as you might expect. Talked a bit about this during my Marina commission about my new methods of denoising renders that were done in Cycles. This entire render uses a flat 128 sample count, and using my new methods that keeps noise temporally stable and then denoise after, it produces a very VERY nice result. Once I rap up releasing this animation, I'll try to finally record a guide, or at least the process I take, on how I get this done, as it's definitely a viable option in a lot of cases.

Thank you guys for sticking around during my staggered activity on this channel! Once I started getting involved in real animation jobs, it's been tough finding a good balance between my own personal animation projects and actual animation work. And lately I've been feeling the urge to actually try to find that balance so that I can do both. Hopefully I find it, because I miss this!

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