Jiyan, leader of the Midnight Rangers, acts with swift and resolute righteousness. He possesses the formidable ability to conjure a powerful Qingloong from the winds, making him invincible on the battlefield.
"Beware the Well of Shade, for the shadows run deep through its endless walls and twisting caverns"
I've been messing around with this rig on and off for awhile, but I finally finished this little side project making a short scene in the style of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
I've never been quite happy with how Starswirl the Bearded looked in the show when he finally appeared but, last year I happened upon a really cool fan design of Starswirl by the user Orin311 that I fell in love with. I decided to make a one view puppet rig this year directly based off their vector art as a surprise, complete with show style lip sync and a full walk cycle. One thing led to another in adding a background, a few illustrator texture brushes, multiple sound effects, re-purposing some old fire animation of mine and suddenly it became a whole completed scene. With such a cool wizard design, the choice for using Gandalf's voice to test the rig with was a no brainier. The background is based on the Well of Shade location in the Season 7 finale of MLP.
I had a lot of fun making this and it was great practice for some future personal animation projects I wanna start next year!
Credits for the character design and sound effects listed below
Starswirl fan design by Orin331
Lord of the Rings audio
fire audio
rocks and pebble audio
magic effect audio
horse walking audio
Designs inspired by the Ineffable Husbands duality, including my take on the iconic good omens tattoo: the flaming sword + snake! and a couple of hands of god, playing her ineffable game with the universe.
If you are interested in getting one tattooed, by all means, do it! (and consider making a donation to my Ko-fi)