I am but a humble soy

The one owner of one of the horses:

So I went though all the Vessel sprites and drew each one. I tried to pick out the ones that seemed different and left out others that seemed like the same head shape of others. (like for example the Deepnest ones) There might be some I missed but I think I got most of them.

[Artfight 2023] [14]

Corrupted One

First I draw the individual parts in a 2d art program, in this case procreate. I put an overlay texture that gives it some grittiness. As you can see I separated out the parts I planned to move a little bit, like the top and bottom jaw, eyes, wings, and body segments.

Each part of the texture is applied to a 2d plane through uv maps with the exception of the halo, which is 3d modeled.

The 2d planes are layered in a way that will create shadow when a light is added and avoid overlaps when rendered. This also really lends to the papercut aspect!

Animation for this particular piece is done through something called “shape keys” where blender will interpolate movement based on me slightly moving the individual parts.

I created several keys for different areas of motion. When all are combined it creates a nice effect. Some parts move smoother than others - this is due to me setting some keys to be “constant” instead of “bezier smoothed”.

(Oh also the halo is just rotated on an axis - 3d go brrrrr)

After rendering all the frames into a gif, I then threw it into a video editor to make the colors more contrasted and to add slight glitching and behold! Final product!