The Finished, Fully Animated 3D Ponatina Model by DJTHED!!

The Ponatina model by DJTHED is coming along great! With the core setup complete we're free to animate her however we please.  And what could be a better start than a smooth idle, smiling at the camera, and showing off a mighty KICK all-in-one!

So we got crackin' on just that.

First we did a nice turnaround to get a good look at full-on 4K Ponatina from all sides in a simple and clean room. (With dramatic lighting for flavor.)

Then it was time to setup the action shot.

Needed to get the lighting just right so every frame looked nice and all the key frames were lit perfectly, conveying all the motion we want your eyes to catch within the couple seconds it's going on. DJ used a special lighting room in blender seen with his other creations on his channel.

Messed with all sorts of lighting scenarios to get the contrast just right. Also taking into account we'd need a "green-screened" version so we can put this anywhere in future videos, DJ had Ponatina and the background rendered on separate layers.

First result ended up like this.

The shadows were a bit too harsh and the background felt to "heavy" so we tried adding some color and brightening things up a bit. By adding lavender of course!

To no avail. Just didn't feel right. Too soft. Too lavender. Too washed out. Other colorful variants were a no go as well. So it was back to white.

Which worked a lot better anyway. And certainly less hassle than our original concept of rendering a whole blurred out nighttime stadium in the background. Less is more ya know? (Also the budget was reaching it's limit.)

And once the look was settled we got to see her breathe!

So next was a matter of posing out the kick animation. The one that looks like this in-game.

You can see the kick slowly coming together...

And Psyaryu insisted we have her smirk, so as a little flair:

When all was said and done, DJ proudly presented this...

And our mission was complete.

Take a look at this Creative Commentary Video on DJTHED's Channel where he breaks down the process of making the magic happen over timelapse footage. And a video version of this blog series will be up on the YotesMark Channel soon so you can see all of this Action footage in it's True Uncompressed HD Glory! (So sub to us if you haven't already, pretty please?)

It's been amazing to see it all come to life from vague idea to Dreamworks quality movement.

This whole experience has amped up team morale, given us some amazing graphics to advertise the game with, and got us thinking about eventually translating the entire world of BGP to 3D someday. 

Hopes are that anyone reading all these blog posts about Ponatina are excited to play the game she's from as well when it finally debuts sometime within the next 14 months on mobile platforms everywhere. 

You can keep up with the game's development on social media and be the first to play new demos every few months by joining our Patreon Squad!

Our Discord's popping off as well, so you can chat with the BGP Community there.

Til' next time folks. New demo drops January 5th in time for our Magfest showcase!