Samus Scroll 1: Might need a new scroll

2/7/19: Might need a new scroll

Where the hell did I leave off? Right, broken sign.

RedOwl's animation has been adjusted for the sign.

For the scenes with the flying car, I made the camera feel as floaty as the car so it felt like you were really Spiderman.

That's the thumbnail right 'dere. Sliding into action! I MIGHT actually make it my wallpaper.

At first, I thought this ready stance would be ridiculous and old fashioned. Turns out that it feels exactly like what Samus would do in motion.

I did a lot of study on ZSS's run in SSB Ultimate. It's definitely interesting. I added stomp camera motion effects to give each step impact.

Whoops! We all know what those electric sparks mean!

I learned how to use the action editor in Blender! So the dope sheet is an overall view of everyone's INDIVIDUAL keyframes in the scene. So instead of making a new Blender project like I did with Neko Vid, (Yet another mistake on top of the many to fix in that one)
I go into that person's action, name it, then create a copy. Delete the keyframes there except the last one and you have a frame perfect and fresh #2 for that character inthe dope sheet.
What's weird is that you can select a bunch of others' animation to be used on that character in the scene. I tried putting one of the guys' animations on Samus and it actually performed pretty good!
BUT, because there's always one of those damn things, when switching back to Samus's original animation, her arms were completely screwed throughout. Very weird.

Yeah, this Scroll is LONG.
The animation has currently reached 1 minute and 10 seconds!

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2/4/19: Getting Caught Up

Ok, I'm gonna jam pack this all the way up to where I am in the animation. Let's get right to the fighting! I also have some texture editing trickery in the end along with slight destruction.

Catching a sword with her heel. I forget how I thought of it but i'm glad I did!

I did add electricity to this part as she growth-kicks here, but effects don't show up in screenshots.

Now that I've added a bit of neon to Samus's eyes, it's even more important that she looks in the correct area. I was worried about 2 shape keys of her looking down AND to the right might cause problems, (eyes going behind socket, previously) but I think it will work great after some testing.

So I have a face light on Samus. It doesn't cause shadow, but it looks great for the situation here. Although maybe looks a bit off. I wonder if I should do a huge spotlight looking upwards instead. That way her face doesn't seem isolated.

That guy in the back is only now peeling off the wall! (He's fine)

After Bowsette, I suddenly feel like I've used crush-growth quite a lot. Probably because it rocks.

This shot looks tons better with proper face expressions! I also added a purple light on the side and it really splashes it with color.

Mmph. Disrespect right there to use a guy to hit another guy.

Here's a screenshot version of this picture. It's got  facial expressions now that Samus is actually looking at... damn it, above the dude. Marked for fixing.

I found a lightning effect and I just went ham with it! This is pulled from the rendered video so you can see the motion blur and effects. This is also my first time trying quick attacks that cancel startup lag. Surprisingly effective with motion blur!

Samus will be full electric here, but at least she's looking where she should.

Samus doing one of her unique stretches here. Was this planned? Absolutely not. It's something I felt only Samus could and would do at this time. Godlike scene.

I had to time the screenshot button multiple times to capture this effect of her boots firing off. Effects seem to work as the animation plays, but not paused.

Now the joke here is that he gets hit so hard that he needs a drink. This scene plays out exactly as you think it does!

Now this is what I worry about the most. I can't subdivide the model since I already have so many shape keys attached to her and that you can't apply modifiers with shape keys. I NEED to figure out higher polygon edits for the models or the up close shots I love are gonna suck.

Here we see Samus without a face light scaled to her. I'll fix it, but not you see why it's so necessary. This scene, she rubs on the dude while interrogating him. For some bloody reason, I felt like doing it. It was supposed to be a First person POV interrogation, but let's just make it as intense as possible for you.

This is right after the guy says no or something that's totally unhelpful. Samus is obviously peeved.

Just enough to slam the guy into this light.

Figuring out how to do that OW on the sign was very puzzling. I though, "oh, I'll just edit the green out a bit"
Nah. It's not set up like that. It;s setup like this weird color chart. I somehow solved this puzzle at 1am, but it looks completely nuts! My guess was that the sing had to be reading parts of the texture somehow in order to get it's color. Not only was my gues correct, my solution of simply putting black squares on it was perfect! Now I can even control how bright the red or the green are separately!

So here we have what I edited to get the light to work. Obviously, I replaced the original texture. So the light already has part of it blocked. But now to turn them off and on. I found out that the top area is the emitter of the light. So it multiplied on itself to... do that. Anyways, I added another multiply node because 0 x anything = 0. So if I have 0 be black, which pretty much turns off the emitter, then multiply it by the texture light source, then it's zero. But here's the unique thing about that black material at the top. It's a parameter.
I recently learned that parameters are able to be used in the sequencer! Which means I can control the color of that black to whatever I want!

So here, you see that I'm able to boost the red OR the green to any high level and drop them separately down to zero. I don't know how that separately works when it's just one color it's extracting from... wait... it's because the texture is only extracting certain colors too. Clever.
So now that I have full control over how I want the sign to flicker, I needed to figure out how to have the sign swap from perfect to destroyed. Since this one's texture was already cut off by the black squares and I sure as hell didn't want to think of the blueprints again, I came up with a simple solution. There are 2 signs. The original one and the one I exported from Blender. The original is up all the time until the frame before it gets hit. Then I swap the signs that are visible into the one I edited. Btw, knife tool edit the sign first before adding a bent up shape key. Yikes glitchyness if you edit while there are shape keys.
I wonder if this is the technique I should use for further destruction effects without the edited separation lines appearing beforehand? (like multiple tears in clothing or cracks in the street) I believe It's the same thing I did for Pyra and her clothes ripping.

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1/30/19: Ready to Fight

After fixing Samus's eyes and applying Smash Bros Ultimate textures onto her WiiU model, it's like we have the best of all worlds! Muscles and an un-nerfed bod!
After finishing up animating Samus getting up from the ground, I actually went back on in the night to add little electric effects for each spurt that will happen. I've also applied some ridiculous lights to each of the bad guys' weapons for some fun sci-fi there. Lots of lighting changes in terms of brightness and making sure Samus's face looks well-lit.

There's a few spotlights surrounding Samus for scene color variety AND a face light that casts no shadows so that nothing is too dark.

I parented electric effects, toggle-able in the sequencer, to Samus's body parts.

I also found out how to change the color of anything I want by using a parameter node rather than a regular constant. Parameter nodes show up in the sequencer for full control! I was able to make her eyes flash green with it!

Things that didn't go as well as thought involve the hair physics. It's CLOSE to looking right, but I need to look up just a few more tutorials so that everything doesn't look like it's waving all over the place.

Another thing is that I thought Samus's suit was too dark and blue. I made changes to that as well to make it look right for the dark environment.

Now her body is much clearer to read!

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1/29/19: On a Roll

With the help of a MMD Size Discord fellow named EggTimer, I was able to get the textures from Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Now we all know that Samus was nerfed in the T&A regions, but buffed in the muscle regions. What I did was apply the Ultimate ZSS textures on top of the WiiU model. BEST OF BOTH WORLDS! 

Hair physics will come in a bit later, but shouldn't clip through the wall at all once I'm done with it.

The gun acts up and will have special effects for it turning into a size ray.
Yup, this vid is starting right off the bat!

Another thing to notice is that I solved the face cut problem! I delete the multiple face materials and left only 1. Instantly smoothed it all out.

Samus is already quite a bit bigger here. To tell you the truth, I made her Other M sized just to make this spurt more impactful. I also found out that setting Blender's render settings to the slowest framerate made the speed come out similar to what I see in Blender!

Now the catch with this model, because every damn model has to have a catch to them, is that her eyes are absolutely bonkers. Rotate the bone so that she looks left? Oh, right. Now her right eye is inside her head and her left eye is off the side of it.

Is there no quality control anymore? I've been using a bunch of shape keys to force the eyes to not screw up when looking around. STILL don't quite have it right, but it's getting there.

I'm much further than this, but I got importing to do for it in UE4. I am now up to Samus finishing standing up. Right after that, I can get a snippet out.