Inkscape/Synfig stuff: bats and ponies. · 1:16pm Sep 23rd, 2015
Well, I'm not a great Inkscape artist yet, but tracing is getting easier. Here's a little summary of what I've been working on for y'all:
From left to right, you can see Scootaloo, Rumble, and Chitter, all in 3Q perspective and the girl in profile on the far right is a lovely young lady named Stella, of the House Malpertuus. The last name, I still need to edit into the story, but it's appropriate enough. Originally it was going to be the House Malcroix, but unfortunately Harry Potter is still a thing, and not something for her to be associated with.
Rumble and Scootaloo were used for testing animation applications, so the way their layers are set up is a little wonky. Their legs are set up to articulate, but not cleanly enough yet. At the moment I'm in the process of drawing different muzzle shapes for facial animation, copying off of a chart used in Double Rainboom. Which reminds me, still need to watch Double Rainboom. Seen a few clips of it, looked kinda neat, on par with other projects in its niche.
Anyway, so Scootaloo is the default foal model, once she's ready for posing and/or animating I can pretty much do the same with other foals that share her basic design, including Rumble. Both of these were made based on show references, obviously.
Chitter was given her colours based on the description in the story, meaning she has Vinyl's mane and tail colours. Her coat is a night blue, but the saturation was turned waaay down so it looks more like a blueish grey. This is gonna be a thing with rousettes in general, with very few exceptions. She also has small fangs, and eyes that can be slit or unslit. I wanted to check if I could do slit eyes, so there. No animation functionality planned for her, mostly I did her as an experiment to see how easy it is to colourshift and do new manedos. Other than that, she's the same as Rumble and Scoots.
The same cannot be said for Lady Stella. Yes, Lady Stella, she is part of a noble family, related to Princess Luna, even. That's why she's basically a filly Flutterbat with Luna's colours; her description marks her as having the 'slender build of a royal', as opposed to the 'awkward lankiness of an early teen'. She was done a lot faster, and her layers aren't organised like the others' were, so posing may pose some problems. I only need her for cover art, anyhow. There's still some messy parts on her legs and hooves, as you can no doubt tell, and her size... I'm not entirely sure of. Filly Flutters was slightly taller than Filly Rainbow, but by how much, it's hard to say. The proportions of her head to body should be accurate, since she's traced and not drawn (still learning, remember), but compared to the others, well, I went with a size that makes it so she can lean in and whisper or softly blow into Rumble's ear without having to crane her neck. She's also tall enough to wrap a wing around him in comfort without having to stretch or crouch. Close enough, I thought.
Now, in terms of design, the rousettes aren't completely traced based on references. Their manes are adjusted slightly, because one of the things that'll come up in part 3 of the Quorum Sensing series is that they always have slightly shorter manes than ponies. The reason for this isn't explained in the story, but the gist of it is that they have a warrior tradition, and as such they prefer not to get anything in their eyes. Shorter hair also forces eye contact more, since they can't hide their gaze. From a practical point of view, it's just scaling and rotating objects, really. Moving the rotation centre really helps.
So what's next? If these gals and guy don't look too hideous, I'll probably add some clothes to Rumble and his youknowwhat for cover art, and then publish part 3. I'll also be trying my hand at those aforementioned mouth shapes to build up a library so making new covers becomes easier. I've already got some plans and progress regarding legs and arms, but still need to go ahead with them. And once I get the hang of that, I'll start all over again on an original creation (probably a deer or regular horse of some variety) and make a tutorial on character building in Inkscape and Synfig. There's a lot of stuff I wasn't aware you could do in Inkscape, and there's a few ways to work in Synfig animation that hasn't been fully covered yet. So here's hoping the lack of experience won't matter too much.
There might be another short fic coming up in the meantime, though, so if part 3 takes a little longer, don't worry: I'm not publishing a new story because I've abandoned the old one. If anything, part 3 is in storage, just needs another round or two of edits. New publication is just to stay somewhat in the picture and work away the apparent failure of Apple Bloom On. Work's been slow due to some minor personal issues, but they should improve soon, so expect more content in the near future.
Take care, y'all,
Cracker.
The animation is great; the writing is subpar.
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So I've heard, which sounds on par with stuff like Elephant's Dream and Tears of Steel. I'll get around to it eventually.