Christmas chaos and forgotten prototypes

So I guess it's Christmas again...

All the decorations are going up, there's hot chocolate in the pantry again, and everyone is busy losing their minds over a whole bunch of trivial stuff that probably won't even get done before the 25th. I don't know what it is about December, but I always kinda feel like I'm just holding my breath and waiting for it all to pass over... I mean, I guess the festivities are nice, but I usually can't tell you what day of the week it is between now and January. Everything just compresses into one big blur of rampant consumerism, holiday music, panic, confusion, and mass hysteria. It's only once someone says "hey we gotta take the tree down this weekend" that you finally snap out of it, and suddenly realize that it's all over and you're stuck right smack in the middle of January wondering what the heck just happened.

Suffice to say, I don't know how much stuff I'm going to get done this month. We've got family coming over which means I can't be seen working on certain stuff, and while I have been working on a bunch of technical things in Houdini, none of them are very impressive to show off without some sort of a rigged body to serve as a visual reference point.

That being said, I really hate letting this account go without at least one post per month (though I fully intend on being able to post more than that in the future), and I did manage to dig up some old prototype renders, so... yeah.

Anyways, the story behind these pictures is that I was basically considering an "FwF remastered" edition at one point in time, pulling in some of the larger chest morphs that I'd done after I finished that sequence. Unfortunately the additional size was a bit too much and kinda messed with the scene dynamics and posing, so that idea landed up getting scrapped and the prototype renders were deleted... or so I thought, until I found them lying around on a DVD-RAM disk a few weeks ago when I went to backup some of the newer projects I've been working on.

I've also posted the original panels from FwF so you've got a comparison point between the two different sizes. IIRC, I'd only ever done 9 alternate panels with the larger morphs, mostly because those were the only panels where the additional volume would still fit into the scene without having to redo everything in the process.

Apologies for the render noise and clipping, but these were just quick prototypes that I'd done to see if something was possible- I never actually intended on releasing them to the public (otherwise I would have ages ago)- but since I don't really have anything else to toss up at the moment, I figured they might be interesting to check out.

Anyhow... since I don't know if I'll be around for the rest of the month, I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

PS: a ZIP file containing the alt frames has been attached to this post for easier downloading.