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Description

Micaiah's model is created by SimplyAChair

Notes:

Well, looks like the award for “least creative scenario” goes to me. I’ve been absolutely loving Radiant Dawn, and knew that I wanted to do something with Micaiah, but I had no idea what. So I just said screw it, and went with the most generic shrinking animation scenario imaginable, “character casts a spell, and accidentally shrinks herself.” I mean, it’s not necessarily a problem, just something funny.

Anyways, that aside, I’m super happy with how this animation came out. There were two things I wanted to do with this animation: Showcase “Mesh Trails”, a new add-on I got for Blender, and utilize more complex and interesting facial expressions to show emotions with more than just body language. While there’s obviously a lot I could have done better, I think I succeeded on both fronts.

Facial expressions have always been something I’ve known was important, but never bothered to put the time into making them. Here though I tried to utilize them to a much greater extent, and gave Micaiah a fairly expressive suite of emotions with them. I tried to make her look determined when casting the spell, curious when looking at the tiny chair, focused while reading, and annoyed when shrunken. I also tried to have her eyes actually track what she’s looking at, and I used some new theory I learned where you have the most agile parts of your body (head, eyes, arms, etc) moving into place before heavier parts do. Overall, I think this made Micaiah a very expressive character.

You know how in a video game or movie when someone swings a sword it has those little trails that follow it? They’re commonly known as Sword Trails, and are used to emphasize speed, and make it clear what path quick moving objects are taking. I’ve wanted to try and use something like Sword Trails for a while, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then I found this new add-on called Mesh Trails, which allows you to very easily add a trail to any object. You can see it used on Micaiah’s hands when she’s casting the spells, where it draws the path behind her hand. It adds a much more magical feeling than just having her hand glow as it moves.

The first spell-casting action that Micaiah does came out great. It’s super fast, and you can really feel how quickly she’s slinging the ball of light. The second one is pretty good too, but I don’t like it as much. It’s sort of a shot-put style of throw. I didn’t want to just reuse the same exact animation for the second throw, but I don’t think it looks as good as the first one.

I knew that I wanted to have Micaiah read the book after she was shrunken, but I wasn’t always sure of how to get her there. At first I thought maybe she would sit on the table as she shrunk, so she would end up there, but that was kind of boring, and hard to imagine the logistics of. Then I thought maybe the book would fall off the table. But that wouldn’t make much sense. Eventually I settled on having her just fly up there with magic, which actually allowed me to use the Mesh Trails add in again, to make those glowing thruster lines that extend off of her hands. She’s got some nice posing as she takes off, flies around, and lands. I think it’s well done all around. The loop she files in near the top gets a little wonky, as she kind of shifts her momentum outwards unexpectedly as she starts the loop, and once she’s in it, her body doesn’t completely follow the flight path. But it still looks pretty cool regardless.

I didn’t always plan to have text in the book, but one of the new features added in Blender 3.6 was the ability to more easily write text. So I thought I might as well take advantage of it and do the gag where she realizes she reads that she can’t reverse the spell. Unfortunately, I’m an idiot, and it took until after I finished the render for me to realize that not only did I misspell the word Beorc in the little book she’s reading, but I’ve been mispronouncing it in my head as Beroc for literal years.

Edit: If you were particularly quick, you may have noticed that I actually uploaded this yesterday, and didn’t put it back up until today. Usually I finish my renders pretty late at night, and put them up immediately after finishing. Well I messed up and accidentally left some particle effects in after they should have disappeared. Because I didn’t really want to stay up for another hour waiting to render, I decided to just upload it the next day.

Since I had a whole extra day to think about the shortcomings of this one, I decided to make up for them by finally listening to what people have been telling me for years and adding in sound. I’ve done SFX a few times before, and while I generally really love editing SFX, it can be really hard to match up voice clips for characters, especially if it’s someone who has really limited voice clips.

I think Micaiah has a total of 4 voice lines across the entirety of Radiant Dawn, and she hasn’t appeared in like, anything, since then. So it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to use her voice clips from the game. And a problem that I’ve run into before, sometimes a clip could be in the right inflection or tone, but if it’s actually saying words, they rarely match up with what’s happening in the scene, meaning they’re unusable. So I thought that unless a character had a massive catalogue of clips that covered basically every single situation you could imagine them in (pretty much only the Xenoblade characters, some of whom have over 30 minutes of battle dialogue alone), I wouldn’t do voices.

(I just realized as I’m writing this that Micaiah has dialogue in Engage. Oops. Even if I had access to it I still would have done it my way though.)

Then I had a really wacky idea. What the character was saying didn’t matter if you couldn’t understand them anyways! I don’t know about you, but I can’t understand Japanese. So any voice clips in that language are basically gibberish to me. So to have Micaiah speaking, I just stole voice clips from Corrin. The ones I picked are mostly from Smash, with some of the sentences being from Warriors. I picked Corrin because she’s in Smash (which has very nearly organized files), has a fairly generic JP voice, and sounds close enough to what I imagine Micaiah would sound like in Japanese. I imagine this would sound super weird to anyone who actually speaks the language, because she’s basically saying complete nonsense all the time.

And the non-vocal SFX are pretty decent too. Some of them are ripped straight from Smash, while sometimes I combined a few to make them sound more distinct. I couldn’t find exactly what I had in mind for the shrinking spell, so I tried a few different ones for the various objects that get shrunken. I’m not sure if any of them really work too well though.

Anyways, having the SFX here is pretty cool, and I think it makes a lot of the animation better, but I’m not sure if I’ll do it for every animation. Some of them just don’t need SFX, and doing this was a ton more work. Especially because I had to go back and render a third time because I realized that if a character is talking, they have to actually move their mouths. The lip sync is absolutely awful here, as she just opens and closes her jaw instead of moving her lips, but it looks a lot better than before, where her face was perfectly static.

Let me know what y’all think of it though. I think a lot of the more action oriented sounds came out well, like when she’s casting spells and stuff, but I’m not sure how well the rest of it works.

Description

Micaiah's model is created by SimplyAChair

Notes:

Well, looks like the award for “least creative scenario” goes to me. I’ve been absolutely loving Radiant Dawn, and knew that I wanted to do something with Micaiah, but I had no idea what. So I just said screw it, and went with the most generic shrinking animation scenario imaginable, “character casts a spell, and accidentally shrinks herself.” I mean, it’s not necessarily a problem, just something funny.

Anyways, that aside, I’m super happy with how this animation came out. There were two things I wanted to do with this animation: Showcase “Mesh Trails”, a new add-on I got for Blender, and utilize more complex and interesting facial expressions to show emotions with more than just body language. While there’s obviously a lot I could have done better, I think I succeeded on both fronts.

Facial expressions have always been something I’ve known was important, but never bothered to put the time into making them. Here though I tried to utilize them to a much greater extent, and gave Micaiah a fairly expressive suite of emotions with them. I tried to make her look determined when casting the spell, curious when looking at the tiny chair, focused while reading, and annoyed when shrunken. I also tried to have her eyes actually track what she’s looking at, and I used some new theory I learned where you have the most agile parts of your body (head, eyes, arms, etc) moving into place before heavier parts do. Overall, I think this made Micaiah a very expressive character.

You know how in a video game or movie when someone swings a sword it has those little trails that follow it? They’re commonly known as Sword Trails, and are used to emphasize speed, and make it clear what path quick moving objects are taking. I’ve wanted to try and use something like Sword Trails for a while, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then I found this new add-on called Mesh Trails, which allows you to very easily add a trail to any object. You can see it used on Micaiah’s hands when she’s casting the spells, where it draws the path behind her hand. It adds a much more magical feeling than just having her hand glow as it moves.

The first spell-casting action that Micaiah does came out great. It’s super fast, and you can really feel how quickly she’s slinging the ball of light. The second one is pretty good too, but I don’t like it as much. It’s sort of a shot-put style of throw. I didn’t want to just reuse the same exact animation for the second throw, but I don’t think it looks as good as the first one.

I knew that I wanted to have Micaiah read the book after she was shrunken, but I wasn’t always sure of how to get her there. At first I thought maybe she would sit on the table as she shrunk, so she would end up there, but that was kind of boring, and hard to imagine the logistics of. Then I thought maybe the book would fall off the table. But that wouldn’t make much sense. Eventually I settled on having her just fly up there with magic, which actually allowed me to use the Mesh Trails add in again, to make those glowing thruster lines that extend off of her hands. She’s got some nice posing as she takes off, flies around, and lands. I think it’s well done all around. The loop she files in near the top gets a little wonky, as she kind of shifts her momentum outwards unexpectedly as she starts the loop, and once she’s in it, her body doesn’t completely follow the flight path. But it still looks pretty cool regardless.

I didn’t always plan to have text in the book, but one of the new features added in Blender 3.6 was the ability to more easily write text. So I thought I might as well take advantage of it and do the gag where she realizes she reads that she can’t reverse the spell. Unfortunately, I’m an idiot, and it took until after I finished the render for me to realize that not only did I misspell the word Beorc in the little book she’s reading, but I’ve been mispronouncing it in my head as Beroc for literal years.

Edit: If you were particularly quick, you may have noticed that I actually uploaded this yesterday, and didn’t put it back up until today. Usually I finish my renders pretty late at night, and put them up immediately after finishing. Well I messed up and accidentally left some particle effects in after they should have disappeared. Because I didn’t really want to stay up for another hour waiting to render, I decided to just upload it the next day.

Since I had a whole extra day to think about the shortcomings of this one, I decided to make up for them by finally listening to what people have been telling me for years and adding in sound. I’ve done SFX a few times before, and while I generally really love editing SFX, it can be really hard to match up voice clips for characters, especially if it’s someone who has really limited voice clips.

I think Micaiah has a total of 4 voice lines across the entirety of Radiant Dawn, and she hasn’t appeared in like, anything, since then. So it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to use her voice clips from the game. And a problem that I’ve run into before, sometimes a clip could be in the right inflection or tone, but if it’s actually saying words, they rarely match up with what’s happening in the scene, meaning they’re unusable. So I thought that unless a character had a massive catalogue of clips that covered basically every single situation you could imagine them in (pretty much only the Xenoblade characters, some of whom have over 30 minutes of battle dialogue alone), I wouldn’t do voices.

(I just realized as I’m writing this that Micaiah has dialogue in Engage. Oops. Even if I had access to it I still would have done it my way though.)

Then I had a really wacky idea. What the character was saying didn’t matter if you couldn’t understand them anyways! I don’t know about you, but I can’t understand Japanese. So any voice clips in that language are basically gibberish to me. So to have Micaiah speaking, I just stole voice clips from Corrin. The ones I picked are mostly from Smash, with some of the sentences being from Warriors. I picked Corrin because she’s in Smash (which has very nearly organized files), has a fairly generic JP voice, and sounds close enough to what I imagine Micaiah would sound like in Japanese. I imagine this would sound super weird to anyone who actually speaks the language, because she’s basically saying complete nonsense all the time.

And the non-vocal SFX are pretty decent too. Some of them are ripped straight from Smash, while sometimes I combined a few to make them sound more distinct. I couldn’t find exactly what I had in mind for the shrinking spell, so I tried a few different ones for the various objects that get shrunken. I’m not sure if any of them really work too well though.

Anyways, having the SFX here is pretty cool, and I think it makes a lot of the animation better, but I’m not sure if I’ll do it for every animation. Some of them just don’t need SFX, and doing this was a ton more work. Especially because I had to go back and render a third time because I realized that if a character is talking, they have to actually move their mouths. The lip sync is absolutely awful here, as she just opens and closes her jaw instead of moving her lips, but it looks a lot better than before, where her face was perfectly static.

Let me know what y’all think of it though. I think a lot of the more action oriented sounds came out well, like when she’s casting spells and stuff, but I’m not sure how well the rest of it works.