Shrinking Stone: Eirika, Tana, L'Arachel

Tana and L’Arachel’s models are created by Simplyachair (https://www.deviantart.com/simplyachair) Eirika’s model is ported by Psalm-Alyx-Roll (https://www.deviantart.com/psalm-alyx...) Ephraim’s model is ported by NobodyPls (https://www.deviantart.com/nobodypls) It’s been like 2 months since my last video, but this one only took a month or so once I started working on it, since it took me a long time to find something I wanted to make. In fact it took so long, that Blender released Version 4.2 which includes a whole new lighting engine for Eevee, which makes the lighting look a lot sharper and more realistic. I think between the reflective armor and the glass, this shows off the new lighting pretty well. Doing something with characters getting trapped in some sort of ball, and the ball continuing to shrink with them inside, is something that I’ve always thought would be cool to do. I’ve never really gotten around to actually doing it though, but I thought now would be a good time. As for the scenario, this is a not-so-subtile reference to a raid encounter in Destiny 2, where you have to carry a ball a certain distance, but every so often the person holding the ball will get teleported inside the ball, and their teammates will have to carry it the rest of the way. The main reference part is that the ball in Destiny is the heart of a dragon that you just slayed, and you have to go inside it’s mouth to grab the ball. I didn’t want to animate them crawling inside the dragon’s mouth, so I just had the ball roll out of its mouth instead. As for why I picked these characters; I just managed to get a version of Eirika’s model that had its face rigged, meaning I could have her be far more expressive than she is in MMD. I didn’t actually do all that much with her expression, but I could have if I wanted to. I also found that Simplyachair, the person I get a lot of my FE models from, had created a L’Arachel 3d model, so I wanted to do something with her too. And Tana was a natural pick too, since she’s the only other girl from Sacred Stones with a model. Another cool trick I picked up is using the technique for making a glowing outline around a character, to create a black, anime-style outline around the characters. I’m a really big fan of how thick outlines look in 2d art, so I wanted to try to replicate it here. It’s not perfect, since it’s too thick when the camera is close to the characters, and there’s some artifacting on parts of the model that probably shouldn’t have an outline, or little gaps that don’t quite go over the whole character. But I think it ends up looking pretty cool. It does a good job of highlighting the character, and making them stand out against the background a bit more. I don’t have too much to say about the character motion or anything this time. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s just not too much exciting stuff going on. The best is the intro animations they all do. Eirika flourishing her sword, and stabbing it into the ground. Tana bracing herself with her spear, then putting it on her back. Those parts look good, but they stop having interesting movements pretty quickly. I do think the individual poses they do are neat, but they’re just a bit too infrequent to be particularly cool. As for the story and script; eh. It's not great. I didn't write out in advance what I wanted the characters to say, and just tried to give them enough time to say a line whereever I thought they'd need it. This means I had to fit dialogue into blocks that sometimes didn't really suit it the best, meaning sometimes the wording is weird or the line just doesn't read very well. It's okay, but certainly not one of my better stories. Sound design is okay for this one. I went with Fiora’s voice (again, lol) for Eirika, Pyra’s voice for Tana, and Pandoria’s voice for L’Arachel. I think Tana and Eirika sound alright, but not a huge fan of L’Arachel. Probably should have picked a different voice, but it can be hard to find one with enough dialogue lines that sounds good. The effects are probably the coolest at the beginning. The intro of the dragon screaming, then crashing down are from Hollow Knight, and it fits really well. I also started trying to add some less noticeable effects, like armor moving or little effects when characters touch things. I still need to work on it, but it sounds better. Hopefully my next animation won’t take as long as this one did.