Still(s)... Moving: 11/9/2026 (Patreon)

Crazy day, huh?

I definitely feel like I made more progress than last week; I sort of came over a significant hurdle with the current video and am making more progress. I finally have some renders for the current video and am in the liquid sim stages with the next. These sims behaved somewhat better than before, except for one I have been trying to render from yesternight into today and it is proving to be a real struggle. I don't forsee it taking too much longer, not because I won't have more technical problems about it but rather I will simply have to move on after a certain point.

While that's happening, I've been working on stills and shorts. I have a few preliminary shots attached that I will talk about. I've also been reflecting on animation quality and what I actually want my animations to look like in the end, since I think improving base animation quality should be my next top priority. -- I wrote the rest of this post before I realized I left this part as kind of a cliffhanger, but I think I will discuss this more next week as I test more things in shorts and since this post is already pretty long...--

I should mention that this is coming after I actually enacted the rig I was talking about for the mouth on Miku so that oral would be easier. The rig isn't done per-say, mainly because there is a fair amount of ease-of-use bones I need to implement for the solution to be truly helpful timewise, but the base of it seems to be functional.

It takes more tweaking than I would have thought to make things look good, but I may be able to automate a good portion of it with a more complex rig. That's for later though, I kind of have to test it more before I say anything about it being "the next big thing" for me. I am still having a fair amount of clipping problems where I really shouldn't be seeing it. There's a particular modifier I have been using to remedy that but I think I need something else entirely as it has like a 10% success rate in terms of looking good, but I do not know of another more effective method (despite looking around). I know for sure it needs a neck rig and I need to combine the head and body without messing up either of the systems somehow...I'll probably end up talking a bit more about this next week.

Something I also realized with the stills is that they should represent a peak moment of an animation frame, as in, should contain the full exaggeration of extremes as from the animation cycle or exemplify the moment of tension with all elements causing said tension in the frame. I was messing with a few different things with these, but I think the best encapsulation of this idea is the yoga pose one, since the camera angle and FOV capture the type of tension in the scene and Miku's expression seems an accurate reflection of that.

I think with the rest I will have to mess with at least the FOV and lighting a bit more in order to capture that better. I have one still here with lighting as that was the primary thing to examine there; I sort of had a vague idea about an image like this but the only thing I could actually discern was the lighting, and I was still having a hard time capturing it probably because the scene is using mostly toon shaders (the light was more washed out/normalized in my very fuzzy conception of this image). That being said, I think this still looks decent, just not how I originally thought it should look. Definitely want to tweak Miku's expression though, and maybe the FOV...

The still with Teto's gock under Miku's ass will make more sense when I show the lighting and textures as that is an exercise in making partial scenes where I can have a simple animation (as opposed to making whole sets that I may only use once or twice, this should be a good time-saver without lessening the impact of the scene/atmosphere). The other one is sort of undecided in terms of camera angle; I like the existing angle from the side but I think it could be better. Originally, I was looking somewhere around waist height up towards the action, but I feel like it seems too similar to other things I've done, and I don't want things to be too similar (difficult to pull off in this business). I will likely end up posting multiple angles from that particular pose as final renders.

Anyway, that was quite the rant. I apologize for my lack of concision today, I've been awake for so long with so little sleep (not by choice). Regardless, I hope you gained something from this at least. Thank you for supporting as always, and I hope you have a wonderful day!