KayKay:3! - Sugar & Spice Patreon Animation + BTS!

Happy Sugar day UwU! Sugar comes to the shop today! October 20th! So I thought what better time to release this than now!

Nothing too too special. Just a looping animation UwU. I imagine the dynamic between these two is something similar to this. Lots of envy :o

I know it's nothing special. I've been working overtime on content this October, believe me. Balancing these regular October posts and keeping up with real life things like the gym and work certainly isn't easy, so I'm really trying here ;-;.

You'll later see down below just how much work I put in these two :0

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Let's start with Spice UwU!

Nothing worth note of on the base mesh itself, however I then had to make her skeleton pattern out of mesh. Now before you say that looks heavy...watch some magic happen later :o

Anyway, I added her pumpkin head here!

Then I gave her some basic colours, but no texture yet. This is a comparison photo. The LEFT is LAST YEARS Spice, and the RIGHT is THIS YEARS Spice :o

Then I UV unwrapped her of course UwU...And now she was ready for texturing :3!

So something I didn't do last year was making Spice's skeleton pattern have like a glittery effect on it. So this year, I did! The left one is my rendition, and the right image is the actual concept art for Spice

You can see more of the glitter stuff here UwU

Then I textured her pumpkin head which actually went through a couple renditions

I ultimately settled on this instead UwU. Just a bit different but more subtle

After that, texturing was pretty much done!

Now about that skull pattern...well watch this :0

As you can see on her wireframe...there IS no topology for the skull pattern :0. It's actually baked on to her texture instead. So making it out of mesh is super easy to bake a high poly detail onto a low poly model!

So finally...now on to her face. You may have noticed that her eyes and mouth stick OUT of her face, even though that's not the case in the final render

Well...this is called "Live Boolean". It was popularized waaaay way back when Veggietales was a thing. They used live booleans for the characters mouths. So...I did the same thing, only modernized and a lot more sophisticated!

As you can see, they're actually cutting holes in the model. So what a live boolean does...is it cuts a hole in the model on where the cutter object is every single frame in the render

The cutter objects ARE these protruding pieces of mesh that look like they are. So they're actively making a cookie-cut of their shape into the head every frame

This gives that sort of jack-o-lantern look! As you can see in the previous image, I have bones set up for them to move them, which is how I can move and slide their mouth and eyes around so easily during animation

Speaking of bones...now finally comes the rigging :o! I often don't take many pictures during rigging because I usually get into a flow state and get the rigs done inhumanely fast. However Sugar and Spice's rigs are still quite complex

The little plus icon at the top is a controller that controls the shape of the mouth!

A panel opens up where I can use sliders to animate the expressions!

And with that, Spice is done UwU!

Sugar is basically the same, just with some differences in the model of course UwU

Here's a look at Sugar's coat....so I made this model before Sugar was properly shown off. I saw on someone else's model and drawing that they did something similar. Everyone though Sugar had some sort of like...biker jacket on I guess? It was later revealed to be more of a tuxedo I guess cause the actual model has coattails. But hey...what are you gonna do -w-"?

Here's her whole model UwU!

And the UV unwrap!

Then I already moved on to texturing...and boy did I have a LOT of issues baking the jacket

I knew what my issue was and all but it's hard to explain. I got it fixed and that's all that matters lol -w-"

Here's a before and after of the texturing UwU! Mostly the same stuff!

This is a random screenshot I took while figuring out how to make the glitter effect not affect the skull pattern

I posted this before, but here's just a look at her sparkly texture for those who didn't see it!

Same with Spice!

Now finally the rig. Pretty much the same as Spice

This is a rare screenshot of me actually building the rig lol

And here's her final rig! Works the same as Spice!

Now with Sugar and Spice out of the way...let me go into some behind the scenes on something I cancelled a few weeks ago

So like yes...I was gonna make a "sequel" to Pumpkin Dance. However I just like...I found that it wasn't something I wanted to do after all. I tried really hard to keep it alive but it never popped off in my head. So I cancelled it. However here are some scrapped things from the short development it had!

Originally, Sugar was gonna have Boo's while Spice had the Peepa enemies from Mario. So I rigged up a Boo :o

Then comes the crazy part....

So I was gonna have like this big set and all and most of it would take place in a treehouse. The set was kinda there to make it feel cluttered but nothing would've ever been used

The whole gist of the animation was Spice was gonna try to convince Sugar to hang out in her treehouse. That's all I really had before I kinda just scrapped it. I found that it just wasn't planning out and it would take me way too long to do

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And with that...I think that's all I have relating to Sugar and Spice! Quite the long post, I know :o

If you did read all of it or most of it, I really appreciate it ^o^! This post took me like an hour to put together

I honestly hope to get one more Sugar and Spice animation out before October ends, but there's no promises at all. However I would like to use the models a bit more since I worked so hard on them UwU!

Anyway, I'll see you next time where I'll likely show off my own Halloween costume that I teased yesterday!