Haven’t done one of these in a while. And I haven’t used Pear Butter in like a year. Spent some time this weak porting over the up to date rig over to her, as well as updating her mane and tail with layered hair meshes. In that time I also decided to rework the eye textures a bit.
Old:
New:
I made them a bit more glowey instead of relying on the plain looking streaks from before, as those honestly didn’t work that well in a 3D environment.
And of course we have the animation itself to talk about. It’s a perfect loop of an idle animation, something I wish I did more often. It’s the perfect type of animation to work on subtle movements, breathing, and weight shifts… and, my favorite, the micro expressions. The micro expressions are key to making a low profile animation like this to work well. Can you imagine how dull this animation would feel if Pear Butter didn’t have any eye darts, eyebrow twitches. Even if she still blinked, it’d be a lot worse because not having any kind of movement in those areas are incredibly unnatural. I’d only encourage doing that if the character you’re animating is supposed to be possessed, but that’s really it.