It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
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btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here
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It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.
I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.
#it's fucked and it's bad design
#i should be able to write and edit for 20 hours a day
#i'm just sitting there how are we even using energy
#feels made up (via @softest-punk, emphasis mine)
Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).
And that's how much energy it's using at rest.
That's the baseline.
So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.
Please don’t let fandom ruin something you love. Walk away and unfollow the fans and enjoy the thing by yourself, or find a limited circle of people who ignore the discourse, or get your irl friends into the thing and collectively ignore the Internet community, or blacklist from here to the moon if you need to and only ever scroll through your rarepair ship’s tag on AO3. But don’t let fandom distort a show or a movie or a book or a comic you used to love so badly that you can’t enjoy the original anymore. Please. It isn’t worth it.
they should make a version of socializing that doesn’t make you feel like you’re still the weird 12 year old kid that doesn’t know why she’s not normal like the other kids
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While I'm revealing fanfic ideas that I'm not writing now:
The sequel to The Misadventures of Rolan the Quick was going to be centered around Volo, who canonically in Forgotten Realms fucks. It was going to feature him sleeping with everyone Rolan slept with in the course of the fanfic but the sex being really, really good. Cue Rolan having a damn meltdown and Mavari and Zevlor being flabbergasted they still have to deal with this bullshit.
I sat down Friday and took three hours to write out everything I had planned for Time and Again's conclusion and the ficverse after. So far, I can't find the motivation to edit that "chapter" and post it. 🫠
I want to start writing silly FF14 crackship/rare pair fics, and mentally I need to check off this box first. Dilemma.
I'm surprised at the results of this poll. Polling friends, the immediate answer was the final wrap up from everyone.
In the end, I *will* be doing the final wrap up. I think if I had maybe two chapters of story left, I could force myself to write a proper conclusion. But there's at least ten to fifteen left, and...I don't enjoy BG3 at this point. I don't have it in me to write the proper conclusion. I want to close the chapter so I can focus elsewhere.
Also, a gentle reminder to please leave comments on fics you like. Author friends have acted surprised when I say I will post things and get no comments and literally mean zero comments. I bring this up because the algorithm keeps feeding me posts of authors who mention they also aren't getting feedback, and I'd like to see that change for their sake.
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I'm considering when I re-edit Time and Again going in and inserting the smut scenes and maybe the side fics rather than giving them standalone fics.
To be honest, the big reason I didn't in the first place was because I thought maybe my family might eventually be interested in reading it (they're not). The secondary reason was that I couldn't advertise in Discord when new chapters posted due to rules of various servers if I give it an E rating.
There is a part of me that thinks part of the fic's issue is that smut is a big draw for readers, and it doesn't have it in there; on the other hand, I feel at this point like everyone who would have been interested in reading it already has. I did get feedback once from someone that people don't want to read Zevlor fic if it's not reader insert, so that's, you know, fun.
why is every tiefling npc fan exclusively making horny reader insert content. look yall i get it tiefling dicks are ribbed for your pleasure and they’re sexy and whatever bla bla bla im horny too but can we all think abt their time in avernus bc elturel being in the hells happened in the SAME YEAR as bg3 takes place in. can we talk about that. That’s really fucking significant these bitches survived being in fucking avernus. There were demons and devils just strolling around the streets of their home and earthquakes and lightning everywhere and they were all starving like. hello. can we talk about how they went through basically an apocalypse for months. And then they got kicked out even after surviving all that. can anyone hear me. i think descent into avernus is required reading for tiefling npc fans at this point because none of you are appreciating the incredible fic potential that the tiefling refugees’ time in avernus has. they had ZOMBIES and all. im begging anyone to play toys with me it’s driving me insane that absolutely none of you are talking about this
While a bit awkward to bring them up here, the tiefling kids are absolute badasses too. Mattis can ask a drow tav if they're one of those underground elves that kidnap children. And if you're lolth sworn and say 'we kill way more children than we enslave' he's like 'UHHHH' and then rolls right into his scam anyway
These kids were all in literal hell too and they aren't afraid of DROW even when other adults and adventures are. And the ones who are timid and afraid (there are a few of course), well, appearances aside they survived in hell too. Maybe it left them scarred more than others and they're finding it difficult to adjust, but they made it.
I say this cause ime (or maybe it's just streamers I watch) players love to dismiss the tiefling kids as rude or brats, but like seriously what do they expect? Yeah half of them are thieves they needed to be to survive. It's a miracle they aren't worse. And even if they were that would at least be understandable.
Anyway hard agree, the more you know about Descent into Avernus the more you can appreciate the tieflings