Sad Twilight

Don't make the astronomy pony miss major astronomical events. It's not good for her (or you).

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While testing out an eyebrow rig I had just made I had the idea to try to replicate a scene from the latest (at the time) episode.

Here's the reference image I used from S7E22 (Once Upon a Zeppelin): sta.sh/0czuvq1awcg

In case you're wondering, no I didn't get super depressed while making this. I actually stayed super happy because I had songs from the movie stuck in my head.

The eyebrow rig is a simple curve controlled by some empties hooked to the curve's handles. To make the empties easier to manipulate they're shrinkwrapped to vertexes on the surface of the face; meaning that they'll move slightly as the eyelids move. Then I set up drivers so the Z axis transform of the empties instead control the distance of the shrinkwrap. To make the eyebrows easy to set up I made a python script that will connect them to the desired model and rename everything. I also made scripts to flip the positions of one eyebrow over to the other.

Some other things I learned while making this image were: Making shape keys. To get the exact shape of the eyes I wanted I went and made my own shape keys for the top eyelids. I also sculpted the teardrops from scratch, sculpting being something I haven't done very much of. But I figured out a workflow for sculpting that I could finally use my Surface Pro 4 for; something I had intended to use it for when I bought it over a year ago. I do all my Blender work on my desktop, but then I open the blend file on my tablet over my local network, do the work I need with the nice pressure sensitive pen, save the file still on my desktop, and then reload the file on my desktop to continue working. I also wanted to get better at making lighting setups, but the lighting in this scene was really tricky trying to add some shading while still keeping it looking like a night scene. Even with the all the time I spent messing with the world, lamp positions, brightness and temperatures I'm still not super happy with it. But at least I can say I made a project start to finish within a week, something I haven't done in quite some time.

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Pony Model by CreatorOfPony // Modified by me

Rendered using Blender Cycles Filmic v.2.79 using Branched Path Tracing with 128AA
Rendered in 39m01s using a GTX 970 at 3840x2160

Stereoscopic 3D Version: sta.sh/01d16qkpn27h
Rendered in 20m55s using a GTX 970 at 1920x1080

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