Discipline and Restraint
 
This piece was an absolute nightmare and a half to finish, now that it is done I never want to see it ever again I’m not even kidding. Ironically despite taking lessons from my Fluttershy and Rarity piece, this one still took even longer to finish than that one. A horrible combination of technical problems and incompetence on part meant that this piece took a stupid amount of time to put together.
 
All I can hope is people like it, if not then well at least I saw it through to the end!
 
(READ BELOW FOR BORING DEV NOTES/COMPLAINING)
 
Technical Problems:  
I was making this piece with Blender version 2.90.1 and about half way through the piece Blender updated to 2.91 which made a few minor cosmetic changes to the UI (as far as I could tell). It was after the update I was having quite a few technical problems, such as weird rendering bugs with the lighting and more crucially both Cycles and Eevee was rendering everything way too dark and I initially thought 2.91 had broken/corrupted my .blend file!
 
That was thankfully not the case however but it did take me a good while to figure out what was causing the issues; it turns out the HDRI I had imported into my file had did a number to the renderer engines and the background world texture. I tried to disable the HDRI by removing/disabling it, however despite turning this off in the nodes it was still active in the background so I thought I may have to start over….
 
THANKFULLY Blender has a cool feature where you can put asset into collection (boxes) and these can be imported wholesale into other .blend files, including new ones. So I copied all the assets into a new collection and then proceeded to import everything over minus the corrupted HDRI and that fixed my issue! This cost an awful lot of time however having to clean the viewport by re-hiding superfluous armatures etc.
 
Texture Issues:  
Once I had overcome that issue; I then discovered that I had actually orientated the texture normals the wrong way around, facing outward instead of towards the camera. A schoolboy error as I forgot to check these near the beginning but again this was another fair amount of time resetting the textures.
 
Posing Issues:  
Posing characters is easy, posing them in a way that looks good on the other hand is hard! This isn’t a fault of the NexGen models themselves, more of me trying to be a bit too ambitious I suppose. I was originally gonna have 4 ponies, but I found that with what I wanted to do pose-wise that wasn’t going to happen.
 
Also the initial pose ideas I wanted to use didn’t look right or didn’t flat out didn’t fit in the camera so I had to have a rethink and go for something a bit more simple in order to get everything in frame.
 
This piece has turned out okay, but looking at the amount of time I spent on it all I see is the compromises I made to get things to work, and now its done I can hopefully slow down for a bit and have a good think what to do next. There is room for possible edits but I will only consider them if people like this one, otherwise I will just move on :)
 
Thankyou for checking out my art, any critique is welcome!