On The Topic of Animation Builds

Okay, so I’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding the Animation Puppets we’re creating for Journey of the Spark and why we can’t use the puppets from Double Rainboom. To give a more detailed explanation, Assistant Director Jan Engel has this to say about the topic:

Alright. Let me clear up the topic of the animation puppets a little. Since we already have the basic body parts (at least for mares) finished, we can obviously take the bodies and recolor them for other ponies. BUT the thing is that the bodies are not necessarily the most difficult part to create. (even if they were, it doesn’t matter, they are done anyways). The point is, the eyes, manes and tails require TONS of different positions which all need to be vectored.

Think of it this way: When a pony is running,turning around, jumping or making any other movement, we want mane and tail to react properly. And you just can’t do that with just one picture for each of those parts. And in terms of recoloring manes, sure that works for a few characters, but I guess I don’t need to explain that this doesn’t work for all of them. I don’t think anyone would be happy with a bunch of Twilight Sparkle recolors, right?

And here’s the deal; We really mostly need to make additional manes and eyes to be drawn, but we have BARELY ANYONE working on that.
I assume by now, it is a bit more understandable, what exactly is the problem here, but wait there’s more! Aside from the fact that Mane-/Tail-/Eye positions take a lot of time because you need so many of them, we will also need colts, fillies and non-pony characters. Think of the good ol’ timberwolves… think of Discord. I hope this clears up all the questions regarding this topic.

Now, to address another topic we get asked about A LOT. Why don’t we use the Double Rainboom puppets/any other open source puppets? Well first of all; We checked them. Most likely all of them. They are good, but don’t necessarily include all the different positions we need. I guess we could technically take other builds and edit them, but due to the fact that builds can be a bit chaotic if the symbols/layers are not all properly named, and organized, that would take quite some time as well, so we might as well make our own.

We sometimes take other builds as reference material, or even copy parts (obviously only, when that is permitted) but that’s it. Hope this answers everything regarding that kind of question as well.