Sweetie Bot - Fear Me (Re-Animated)

I finally went and did it. I have just now completed my first animation using proper puppet rigs! After a few months of off and on tinkering around in Flash, I figured out how to organize my Flash pones in such a way that I can animate them without wanting to tear out my eyes and drink heavily. Sure, I could make some bouncy pone butts dance across your monitors before, but getting complex faces down is only a recent development. We’re rollin’ now! This is just a short animation test video I randomly found inspiration for a few weeks ago. I simply woke up and thought Sweetie Bot’s ’Fear Me’ scene would be great to see re-animated with an actual RoboPone™, so I went ahead and did it. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into nor that such a small video would take so long to polish up correctly, but who cares about all that, right? We’ve got relatively show accurate animated pones to look at now and that’s all that matters. It’s but a few seconds long, but man, it paves the way for some wicked gnarly mental stuff in the future. I learned a LOT from doing this 3 scene test, mostly on how to time things when working in FPS. Honestly, I think the animation crew over at DHX probably do their pones in 24 FPS (which I think is industry standard) then maybe adjust the frame rate up afterwards, but working in FPS allowed me to practically mirror the show’s Sweetie Belle scene for the first part of this test. The second scene was my first attempt at creating a unique pose for my rig while still making it look faithful to the show’s animation style. Unexpectedly, I actually had to delete a lot of keyframes to make the animation look less smooth in order to match the show’s appearance better. It looked very uncanny when compared to the first part of the Flash, so I took a hammer and began swinging away at my precious keyframes. Most of them survived, so it still looks cool. Finally, the last scene was great for figuring out how to get two rigs to ’interact’ with one another. I also got to rig up best pony, which was very, very good. Since I’ve got all the assets made now, I don’t think it’d be terribly hard to do more animations with Sweetie Bot in the future. Who knows? --Circlejerky Stuff-- First off, HUGE thanks to Sherclop for the creation of his neato Sweetie Bot character idea that I probably used without his permission. You’re the man, Sherclop! Second, I’d like to thank the many artists that I drew inspiration from for the rough design for the Sweetie Bot I eventually up with. She’s kinda got this Portal like appearance in my rendition, which is pretty. Eyes were a lot of fun to do, what with the ’degauss blink’ and ’scanlines’ and all that fun stuff. Big thanks to Tiarawhy for initially helping me get started with Flash pones in the first place. He gave me a sample file waaaaay way back that I was able to learn the concept of ’masking’ from; without that, I would still be stuck trying to figure out how to animate the eyes. I’m kinda shit with vocab, so I probably wouldn’t have figured out I needed masking without a little nudge in the right direction. Also wanted to thank my good friend Kortz for tempting me back into animation; after a quick project idea he threw my way, I got hooked on trying to figure out how to animate pones again. Another good friend, MixerMike (better known as Fluffle Puff) has always been a source of encouragement whenever I produced something in Flash. Every little bit of encouragement helps an artist feel just a slight bit bolder and willing to try new stuff, so that was big when tinkering around in Flash. He’s a cool dude. --End of Circlejerkyness-- It’s about time I got something else up on this channel. Until next time, keep it classy, ponefriends.