Firefly's Photo Booth (Honkai Star Rail Shrinking Animation)
Since some of the photos they take aren't on screen for very long, I put a link to where you can look at them yourself in full quality: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Oh look, something that isn’t based on a Nintendo game. I think this is the first one since… early 2023? I guess I really do pretty much just do Fire Emblem and Xenoblade.
I think the concept for this one is pretty fun. A photo booth that shrinks the people inside. I thought the way I showed the girl shrinking in each of the pictures was fun too. How you see her getting smaller and smaller in each picture, then the booth opens and you see her holding the smaller girl in her hand. It’s cute.
For the original concept, the three of them were supposed to be in the dream world for this, and wake up to find that Firefly and Robin were still small in the real world. But while working on it, I decided that would be a bit difficult to implement, and since they were in the Astral Express environment, it would make sense for them to be in the real world the whole time.
I decided to replace that sequence with the shot of Trailblazer spreading all the photos over the floor and looking at them, letting Firefly and Robin down to stand alongside them. I think it does a good job of selling their scale, since the comparison to their size in the photos is fun. The shot where Trailblazer pulls the photo out from under Firefly is a fun interaction too. And I like that it gives a bit more time to look at the photos, since they’re not on screen for too long when they’re first shown.
One thing I’m not very happy with in this is the shading. I used MMD models for this, and I believe there is an error with the lightmaps that makes the faces appear almost ghostly pale. It’s particularly bad on Firefly, since I think her skin tone is normally a bit darker, so there’s a really noticeable difference between the skin on her body and the skin on her face. I would have liked to use the models ripped from the game in order to use custom made shaders that replicate the game. But I couldn’t find them until after I started work with these current models. If I do another animation with the Star Rail characters I’ll probably try to use that custom shader so that it looks better.