Content Creation Of Saphire Systrine!

[Ice Princess Silky <3 13,537]

I am making this thread in honor of a shy pony named @Saphire Systrine. They are a pony content creator. 

The only caveat is that some of these videos might be a bit intense or hold scenes of a less than light-hearted/fluffy light. 

They shall be placed within spoilers along with TWs, like: sadness, depression, etc

Here is a sample with the video of Luna that they've personally created. 

Here's an example of one:

Luna: Lonely.
Themes: Sadness, breakup. (Not in spoiler this time since it's not too graphic at all <3 

I hope to encourage more content creators of the pony fandom to post their artistic endeavours here and if a Moderator should zap this out of existence, we can always just blame @Cash In the fun slayer...

[Saphire Systrine 163]

Awh thank you, you didn't have to! You're very sweet.

Youtube kinda really crunched that video because its all shades of dark blue, so if anyone wants to see it in crisp quality they can download it from Google Drive here!: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dYK6FY1k5QWRP47eozX82XI4SfkfDY-7

Same warnings: a Lonely Luna and themes of sadness and breakup.

Included in that drive folder is also the 3D animation file with the Luna model :3 which anyone can use however they like!
If anyone is curious about that model, it's the Valiant Studios Twi V1.2 model, which was released for free as public domain for anyone to use. I love makin' horse animations with her because she's so easy to change into any other pony ouo

Like here! This one has no warnings because its just cutie ponies and fluttershy singing So Many Wonders over a cool song by Evgeniy Doctor :3

Hope that's not too much info and I did this right D:
anywho, enjoy >u<

[Rare Crypty 4,765]

Nowadays every any content creator is a hero. I pay respect to @Saphire Systrine.

*Salutes*

[SharpWit 2,614]

I'm curious about the breakup part?

My initial interpretation of Lonely Luna was part of what was going through her head during banishment, and there having been a relationship with Sombra before turning evil, interested me with the idea of her own transformation being due in part to wanting him back, only to find herself further than ever. Elements of jealousy and revenge would play an even greater role, given my understanding of Celestia and alternate Sombra's relationship in the comics.

Great work!

[Comp 165]

As the latest techie to work on Pony.fm, I gotta recognize Saphie Systrine for their work putting together the Pony Voice Index. Great work!!!

[Saphire Systrine 163]

23 hours ago, Creepy Scribbles said:

Nowadays every any content creator is a hero. I pay respect to @Saphire Systrine.

*Salutes*

Awh thank you! There are so many tiny content creators out there, so many that don't get seen because the algorithms wont promote them! A friend of mine has made a playlist of over 300 underrated videos!
Underrated Brony Content playlist
Underrated Brony Review/Analysis playlist
Underrated PMV Playlist

The more you watch these, the more youtube will show them to you in your recommended

But thank you :3. It means a lot. I hope you enjoy these playlists!

Bonus link: This is a video that is the entire Season 3 finale translated into ASL

 

23 hours ago, SharpWit said:

I'm curious about the breakup part?

My initial interpretation of Lonely Luna was part of what was going through her head during banishment, and there having been a relationship with Sombra before turning evil, interested me with the idea of her own transformation being due in part to wanting him back, only to find herself further than ever. Elements of jealousy and revenge would play an even greater role, given my understanding of Celestia and alternate Sombra's relationship in the comics.

Great work!

You can certainly take it that way! I wasn't the one who labeled it as a breakup, that was Silky's interpretation, I just copied her tags out of politeness
It is open for any interpretation
 

21 hours ago, Comp said:

As the latest techie to work on Pony.fm, I gotta recognize Saphie Systrine for their work putting together the Pony Voice Index. Great work!!!

Awh thank you!
For any who dont know (hope I dont get in trouble for saying this!) The Pony Voice Index is an index of impressionist voice actors in the fandom! Their contact info is kept up to date, their impressions are rated for accuracy, and other things like if they can sing or speak other languages are listed! I created this because when I was trying to figure out why many people were starting to use AI voices, I realized that there were 3 major issues that caused it:

1. Fandom VA's are really hard to find. The popular ones are swamped with work, but there are so many more that dont get seen because, well, they're voice actors, not youtubers!
2. Even if you do find them, many of them have no obvious way to contact them, making it almost impossible if you want to try to commission/work with them
3. Even if they can contact them, they might not be able to afford them (that is what Rarity Project is for)

I have personally been struggling to maintain/update it because of irl struggles, but yeah! Hope this isnt advertising D: If it is let me know and I'll shut my muzzle x.x

 

Either way!

Thank you all so much for your compliments ;u; You are all very sweet! Gouda beans

I'll be honest, its nerve-wracking posting here D: its scary to have a spotlight on me in such a new place and I'm really nervous about breaking the rules for advertising :c Trusting Silky on this one ^^;

[Saphire Systrine 163]

Figured I shouldnt dissapoint @Ice Princess Silky <3 and actually post here. Hmm. Since just sharing links seems like a dumb waste of forum drive space (since I know yall gotta pay for this!), I might as well make it work the time by talking about the intent, meaning, and process of the creations, and show unpublished stuff, since no one outside of my close friendgroup sees this stuff anyway...

8-Bit Reign - A World Out of Time

TW// Guns, bad robot ponies, mildly dark themes? But not too dark :3

Purpose/Origin -

Originally called "Lonely Strings" for most of its production due to beginning as a piece to test Venus Theory's "Strands" plugin, this song took me around 12 hours to make, but over a few weeks, since I spent a long time mixing this one.

Part of my 8-Bit Reign Saga, this is the first major bridge between the 8-Bit Reign universe and the FlutterCaves universe, while also acknowledging both are part of the Nexus timeline for the first time.

8-Bit Reign is the story of a digital world subjugated by a power only referred to as "Her" told through music and, possibly in the future, animation. You can find most of the album here on soundcloud:

However, I need to change the order a bit. (it doesnt get uploaded to sound-cloud anymore because I ran out of minutes ;u;)

Meaning -

As stated before, A Word Out of Time solidifies the connection of 8BR with FlutterCaves saga and the Nexus timeline. The description states that this is "Timeline Variant #11537- D-Gen CaiDyN Variant #3", which means that this is the #11537 timeline (not quite relevant), during the 4th timeline alteration/version (D), and during the 3rd timeline generation/version of CaiDyn (the main antagonist in FlutterCaves Saga). So this is fairly early into the nexus timeline. The description goes on to say that a Consciousness Containment Unit (those little things that look like Pokeballs but aren't) has "corrupted" the timeline by duplicating itself (as a Rainbow Dash robot). This doesnt make too much sense if you dont see the animation for it, which is currently sitting as an unfinished WIP you can see here:

TW// Mild flashing, bright flash at very end:

The story is from the perspective of a street in Canterlot. After night has fallen, something really wrong happens, and these Dash bots go to deal with it. They dont succeed, however, and it's revealed that an army of Fluttershy bots is marching through Canterlot and causing destruction. The Dash bots drive them back, though one is left fallen in front of the house. A small filly comes out and uses her magic to give power to the Dash bot. It stands and smiles at her, and then suddenly more Fluttershy bots appear and begin their assault. The Dash bot shields the filly, yet more and more Flutterbots appear and begin to overwhelm it. The day is saved, however, when a bolt of lightning strikes the area, causing all of the bots to shut down. In the end, the filly reactivates the Dash bot, and it stands guard at her house.

You can see the test of the little filly here. The final image in the video is the Dash bot protecting the filly from the Flutterbots:

You can see the CCE core in her chest there :3

Sadly, I did not complete this animation, as it was way above my skill at the time. The animations you do see are walk/run cycles animated by Ashley Eversole from Dimensional Shift, as I own the company making DS.

In the end, this generation is again destroyed by the Nexus, but not all hope is lost. That has yet to come...

Thanks for reading ^^. If this is too much info, please let me know!

Bless you all :3 - Saphire

Edited October 14 by Saphire Systrine

[Saphire Systrine 163]

Hmm, seems I can upload files here. Thats awesome :3

I'll just plop this unfinished one here then...

 

Name: Brave Confrontation
Other Involvements: Partial melody collaboration with Zenko
Status: Music Unfinished
Purpose: 8-Bit Reign Saga
Date first made: 12/29/2022

[Saphire Systrine 163]

For the first time in a long time, I actually decided to tackle making the Katari Fighter in 3D. This time it actually turned out great!

 This is some of the art I did of the fighter years ago:

The current 3D design was inspired by a piece TwinkleStarCC made me a while back:

As for some lore behind these:

They're mostly biological ships, made of flesh and organs integrated with technology assembled by nanobots. They're quite literally "grown", and while there is an inside that can be used to pilot it if needed, it is usually controlled by a Katari possessing it, as in, hopping their consciousness out of their body and into the ship. Because it becomes their body, they're able to quite literally 'feel' things around them, rather than relying on control panels and displays. Thus they're able to react to stuff on the battlefield quickly.

As for its capabilities, it's meant to be versatile but expendable. While it does have electron thrusters like all other Katari craft, it primarily moves by using its warp field. This allows it to maneuver in very odd ways without putting strain on its structural integrity or on those inside.

For weaponry, it has 4 primary energy cannons that can fire in any configuration and can be micro-adjusted for accuracy. However, its most formidable weapon is its star-blasting system. Basically, it emits and condenses high-energy particles into what is essentially a star using its warp field. It then can fire this like a laser (from virtually any direction, not just forward), launch it as a projectile, or fire its primary cannons through it to further energize its main cannon fire. Multiple fighters can also group together in formation to create a concentrated energy beam that can cut through quite a lot of stuff.

On the downside, though, these fighters are rather fragile in comparison to fully armored craft. In order to maximize production, they are not built with hard-plated armor and instead rely on micro-energy shielding and quick reaction times to either absorb/deflect or dodge income fire respectively. This means they don't have the ability to ram into large heavy-plated vessels and do much damage. Some variants can be made to do this, but generally they aren't needed.

The primary reason for their crescent design, outside of aesthetics and a connection to the Katari symbol, is that the arms contain the warp emitters that control and compress the energy orb in the center.

Once they are done fighting and returned to a Carrier, they can either be disassembled on the fly and reused or be fixed up and sent back out.

The primary behavior and function of this class of fighters is to overwhelm the battlefield with large numbers while inflicting continuous 360-degree damage to enemy forces via swarming behavior.

[Saphire Systrine 163]

Since these will probably never be posted anywhere else, here are two little gift videos I did for a friend! The one with the socks is Alilunaa, and the other is IMShadow007's ponysona, Bella Voce!

The pony models are modified versions of the Twi V1.2 models to look like their respective OCs. The dance is a small dance loop taken from another WIP animation of mine and made as a gift. It was originally a Secret Santa for a friend of mine, and I made these two versions afterwards

Rendered in Blender, of course

Alilunaa Dansen

 

 

 

Bella Voce Dansen

 

 

 

 

[Saphire Systrine 163]

1 hour ago, Saphire Systrine said:

The dance is a small dance loop taken from another WIP animation of mine

  And you can see that here! As with most of the stuff I've been posting recently, only close friends/work friends have seen this via Discord, or clips on my work live streams, so yall will be the first to see it in a larger public way

The song you're about to hear is my cover/remix of Pretty Rave Mare by FL0 and Shuffle, which was a ponified cover of S3RL's Pretty Rave Girl, who's was inspired by Daddy DJ by Daddy DJ. Daddy DJ also inspired DotA by Basshunter, which is what I thought Pretty Rave Mare was inspired by, so I ended up combining the two styles of the songs in my own cover/remix.

In my version I added the rave mare in the second half, which was played by my friend ZenKo, and on the crack idea of another friend of mine in a call, I turned it into a Hardcore Drum and Bass song!

Without further ado, here is that song in it's full mix. I know there's one on pony.fm, but that one wasn't mastered correctly (oops!)

(Oh, and the rave-colt is sung by yours truly )

Anywho! With that mild context out of the way, I have delayed uploading it to youtube because I want it to be a cute animation.

At first it was REALLY difficult to figure out how to synch the animation and music in a way that wouldnt require me going beat by beat to add keyframes. That lead to initial experiments like this:

 

 

 

 Yeah it didnt work out 

So I gave up and downloaded a blender plugin that put guides down on the timeline for me. After several hours of my patented Get-Hyperfixated-Dont-Sleep formula, I had these test animations. The first you're going to see is the full animation as it currently is. It doesnt look too good because I had to render it on low settings in order to get it to render in a reasonable amount of time (an hour instead of a day). This is because it's rendered in Cycles, which is Blender's native ray-tracing engine. Why cycles? Because I needed to use the dance floor as a dynamic light source, and that just wasnt going to work with the other render engine, Eevee.

 

 

 

 

This next one, which is only a short clip, is a sample of what it will probably look like fully rendered!

 

 

 

 

 You may notice there's some glitching with the model. That's because [technical response]

Spoiler

the IK/FK switch on the model doesn't ACTUALLY switch between IK and FK. Instead, its always an IK rig, but when the FK switch is flipped, a Copy Position modifier on each of the hind leg bones snaps the IK bones to the FK control points. However, Blender, for some reason, does not process this first in its pipeline. It processes it after a frame is rendered, which leads to the glitchy glitch because the IK is reacting to the movements, then in the next frame the Copy Position modifier forces it into the correct position. In order to fix it, I have to remove the IK/FK switch functionality for the hind legs. I only recently figured this out when I almost went crazy trying to get Rainbow Dash's legs to stop glitching all over the place    (you can see her hind legs shaking at the bottom of the screen). Thankfully I figured it out

Unfortunately animating ponies is not something I'm well practiced in, so I kinda set this to the side amid mental health issues (ptsd) also making life harder. I have made a little progress, like fleshing out some tests of the rave lights, which you can see here!

TW// Flashing Lights:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

Now you might be wondering... who is that rave mare?

Her name is Checkerbloom! She is a Secret Santa pony from /mlp/'s annual secret santa. Since they're all anonymous and it's hard to keep track of who's santa is who's, they assign made up names randomly. As a sort of tradition, those names get turned into OCs, with input from several people in the thread. Checkerbloom turned into a cute rave mare, and then Fl0 and Shuffle made a cute cover of Rave Girl as a gift for the anon behind Checkerbloom! In fact, it was Shuffle who drew the art in his video!

Here's some other art I found from the threads. Given this was on /mlp/, there aren't any credits, they're all anonymous! Though I'm pretty sure the second one is Batsy

I personally wasnt involved in the secret santa (I dont go on /mlp/ anymore), and didnt even quite know it WAS from a secret santa until a little ways into the project

Either way, it has been fun, if not a little challenging, to work on so far, and I hope to finish it one day

When collaborating with ZenKo, she drew some fan art of Checkerbloom, adding a bow to her hair, and even designed a "rave colt" to go along with the rave mare! She also drew up the cutiemarks as png's for me, which was very helpful

And here is how they looked in 3D

In the end I ended up changing the Rave Colt's colors, but honestly I don't remember why? Something about the white was looking weird? Dont rember

(The rave colt is the Midnight model from Dimensional Shift, but he's not publically available yet so I can't share that yet )

Anywho, hope you enjoyed! I do wish to get this finished and up one day, Lord willing!

Oh! On one last note! This cool bean made a dance game version of the song! He made a special short cut of it in order to fit in the game's parameters. I believe you can download it and play somewhere, but I am unsure

Anywho, love you beans, have a good night/day!

Edited October 19 by Saphire Systrine
added some extra stuff :P

[Saphire Systrine 163]

On 2024-10-20 at 7:42 PM, Saphire Systrine said:

Finding the Magnificent and Legendary Alicorn Twilight Sparkle

Please note this works on Dream Logic, so details are inconsistent.

It was Earth's Star Trek era, humanity was just beginning its major explorations of the galaxy.

Many years ago there had been a starship of ponies led by Princess Twilight Sparkle to explore the galaxy. (dunno where the ponies came from, but not from earth??)

However, they had been lost to space for a long time, and presumed dead. While Starfleed searched for them, the efforts seemed futile for a long time.

But many years later, a highly possible candidate for the lost starship was found, many lightyears away, very far from all civilization.

As our vessel approached the wreckage of the ship, we were able to see the saucer clearly. It was cold, but still intact. The other parts of the ship were not so lucky, yet stayed together drifting amongst a nebulaic starscape.

 

 

 

 

 

Once we docked with the vessel, scans showed a breathable atmosphere inside, so we gathered a large search party to search the ship. The interior was much larger than the exterior, and nothing like a human starship. Supposedly made with the Magic the ponies possessed.

After searching through magnificent structures and winding halls, we reached what seemed to be the center of the vessel, a platform suspended and converging halls and pathways around it.

In the middle was a glowing, pulsating shield bubble, and the silhouette of an alicorn, asleep in a fetal position with ethereal hair waving. As we approached, it was clear this was no small creature. It towered over us even in its weightless sleeping state.

 

 

 

 

 

Deactivating the stasis bubble, the alicorn descended and awoke, her face clearly visible. It was the legendary Twilight Sparkle, last of the alicorns. She was massive, her head about half the size of an entire human body. She looked at us, and then demanded why we awakened her.

 

 

 

 

 

We explained we were here to find her and return her home.

She refused, stating she was not going back to the life she had, and she had a responsibility here. Regardless, we said we were under orders.

She sneered at us, her canines sharp and fearsome. Through gritted teeth she demanded us to leave before she destroyed us. So we left.

Back in our ship, the outside view had changed. The starscape was now almost completely blotted out by space station after space station, all floating and operating in tandom. An entire civilization in space.

 

 

 

 

Regardless, per our orders, we fired a grappling line at the saucer and began to drag it with us at high speed. Unfortunately, it hit a few of the surrounding stations, but was fine.

 

As we continued through the field of ships, what appeared to be massive cityscapes opened up before us

This is where things jumped, and for some reason a friend and I were in that area, down on the ground. We knew we needed to leave, but marveled at the fractal ingenuity of it. Below our feet were what looked like tiny forests teeming with life. However, around us was a lavish hotel room, with one window-wall being made from what looked like falling rainwater. Outside of this wall was pure, vacuous space, yet we were kept safe. The entire place was obviously extreme magic, and did not seem to function in any way we were familiar with. I woke up shortly after this.

  Reveal hidden contents

I woke up from this dream at about 2am, had typed this up by about 2:30am, and started working on these animations at 2:50 -ish because it was just so vivid. Finished up the final render at 7:30pm, so about 16.5 hours. This was the first dream I had about ponies in a long time. Some liberties were taken on that lost shot. In the dream it was just as if they had always been there when we emerged from Twilight's vessel. Either way, hope yall enjoyed it. I'll probably repost this in another topic with more info about the process of creating the shots

So how did I make these? Well, with Blender of course!

Well actually, I started out in Medibang Paint, just wanting to draw sketches. Then I went to make a 3D saucer in Blender since I didnt want to have to fiddle with drawing those perfect shapes in Medibang.

Buuuuuuut, one thing lead to another and I was making a full 3D scene.

The saucer was actually really simple. Just a circle with some extrusions and edge loops. Subdivided a bit to give it more polyes, then random verts on the edges given a different material for windows. The nacelles were just extruded cubes, and the other debris and chunky wrecked ship parts was kitbash assets from Daniel Grove Designs on Blendermarket that I had bought for Dimensional Shift years ago.

In fact, for the saucer under the camera, it's just the same exact one!

Most of the detail comes from an aztec panel material made by my friend Vinson Visions (he was the friend in the dream at the end!)

Everything was rendered in Blender Eevee engine.

The next shot was a lot more complicated. The platform design took much longer than I expected, as did the bubble!

The shape was just really complex to get nice and smooth the way I wanted it to. And then I didn't even show that! Haha! The granite material is courtesy of poliigon.com!

The sheild bubble was another thing. Thankfully Eevee has Transmission settings for its materials. To make it look wiggly like I did, I plugged in some noise to the IOR value. The other glowy bits were just a Wave texture node and a Fresnel node

The Twilight model was actually just the Luna model I had put together a few weeks back, but with Twilight's hair and colors reapplied.

Animating her in the second shot was relatively simple. I just used noise modifiers on the rotation axis of certain bones:

The next one was not so easy, but still worked out! Funnily enough, the room is actually really tiny, but I positioned the camera in ways that it would look bigger

It actually took a big more gumption to render this one due to her animations. Specifically, the hair was quite process-heavy, and my GPU was easily going over 100F trying to view it in the viewport.

For the final scene, we're back to the first model sets. This time, I modeled some simple nacelles for the camera ship. They arent even attached to it, cause ya dont see that!

The Bussard Collectors were just a few spheres layered on top of each other. One was just the metal parts spinning, another was just a translucent material, and the glowy one was just a material made using a Voronoi texture node

While I was making this and eventually thought of transitioning it to show the fleet of space stations, I was trying to think of ways to go about making them appear. I really didnt want to do it in After Effects and add a whole lot of render time to make mattes and such. So I just made a sphere with the exact same background texture and used noise to distort its vector input, then I used that same distorted vector input to warp a gradient texture which I just slid across the sphere and used to control the opacity.

The space station is just the one I made for my recent animation "A Little Bit of Darkness", used as a particle in a cube. I copied that 3 times to get the density and distribution I wanted, and man did that shoot up the render times! Instead of 2 seconds per frame, it was 14! That's 45 minutes of rendering when you're rendering 176 frames! (because I only made them spawn in right before the opacity swipe on the sphere)

And finally, each one had its sound design done in Reaper. I used both effects I made, as well as effects from various libraries such as Series 8000 Scifi Warp 2, The SFX Kit, Boom Library's Scifi Construction Kit, Digital Rain Lab's Lethal Energies, Into Abyss, SilverPlatter Audio's Glitter kit (for the sparkly sounds ), and my go-to for deep booms: Lukas Tvrdon's Distant Blast.

I also used VST effects from Kiloheats, Native Instrument's RC48 and Choral, DearReality VR Micro, and Corkscrew by AnarchyEffects.

Overall, this took about 16.5 hours of pretty much non-stop work. I was really wanting to get these ideas out there, and I'm thankful to God for the blessings of the resources and skill to do so. Used to be I couldnt do this and would only dream of it (haha!), but now I can, and it's all thanks to His grace! And you can do it too, just keep workin at it, dont give up, and dont be afraid to ask for help from the big G! It takes time to learn skills, and you'll never be perfect, but God made each one of you smart and capable through His grace :3 And I'm thankful He gave me that dream too. I havent had a dream about ponies in a loooooooong time.

Edited October 26 by Saphire Systrine