18/9/26 WIP (Patreon)

Got through a decent portion of shorts for the upcoming weeks. Less then I wanted to get through, but I'm starting to think my expectations were unrealistic. I have some snippets (video versions in Discord, Patreon won't allow videos here) that I will go through, though most of them are in fairly early stages of production; I basically started 2 of them this morning, so they definitely need more work. I didn't even do Miku's expressions for the bulk of them yet...

I started shorts to go through some particular reactions I liked and thought could make for good content. One of them is a yoga setup, like Teto is going to help "stretch" Miku in various ways. For some reason, I think this type of setup and reaction is an untapped/improperly used goldmine, so I want to make a more rigorous animation and really test that theory, but I started with this.

Other than that one, I have one testing a stomach bulge mechanic; it didn't work, but I may have a workaround with the usual suspects if I have the motion surrounding the stomach limited. Those workarounds are not active in the video here because I forgot to turn them on before I quick rendered them, but I may enable it for a Twitter WIP Teaser later. I also had a fun idea of Miku cumming on Teto's gock, and I really like the idea of a certain kind of excitability and enthusiasm, but I may have to tweak it a bit more to get that across better. Oh, and a gock windshield wiper, interpretable under disrespect and/or enthusiasm, so right up my alley.

With these shorts as well, for each of them I am testing some animation techniques. I am really trying to get my base animation quality to whatever the industry standard for pornimation is; I have plenty of references to see the quality, but I usually have a hard time picking out specifics, maybe because of the nonlinearity of the movements. I realized today that since I have animation layers I can pretty simply have a character go between some movements while in a loop (breathing/emote/sex) and it looks pretty natural, so that is the main thing I am trying, just in different ways.

I will also briefly mention that the next 2 main videos are coming along. The first (aimed for next week) pretty much just has to be edited, the second (next month) has work required on the alt, mostly some small animation things and hopefully no liquid sims (there are sims for all relevant scenes in there but sometimes they break). It's hard to say if I am on the track I initially thought I would be, but I can't really complain about the progress.

I should also mention what I was alluding to previously about the mouth rig. It is actually a cartoon mouth rig I made from a tutorial online, where there's a ring of bendy bones around the mouth, some ease-of-use controllers for the lip based bones, and a jaw/lip master/etc. This rig is meant to allow for better facial expressions, which I am also using it for, but I can also put a shrinkwrap modifier on the lip controllers of the rig and have it function as a lip seal.

This works in theory, but has some problems, mostly surrounding how big the gock is that is being inserted. I think if it was a normal size, I wouldn't have any problem; I guess there is such a thing as too big... Mainly, it pushes the lips beyond the outer edge controllers, which means the lips track outside of the face and invert part of the mesh naturally. This can be remedied by moving the other half of the controllers, but I have been having some problems with making it look good, partly because of the weight painting still not being perfect, or the outer controllers not being automatically moved by the gock so it does not look as good when done manually, or because of the fact the head of these models are separated from the body, meaning there arises a gap between the neck and head when I do things like this.

The neck thing is not really fixable by manipulating the bones, and joining the head and body mesh is either not a problem or impossible, I've been scared to try. That being said, I think most of the other problems can be remedied with skill over time, so I am not too worried. I more or less knew from the start that a rig was the best way to go about this but it always looked so complicated... it kind of is, but I still did it, so I guess I need to stop being a coward. The last short I posted yesterday was the initial test and it looks promising, but it did take a decent amount of tweaking the bones to get it to look that way.

Is longer good for these posts, or do you just want a progress update? I include some of my ideation principles because I think it's interesting and could be valuable in some capacity. That being said, I am pretty sure this type of post is historically (by other creators) reserved for just progress updates, I just want it to be interesting....

I hope you got something of value from these many rants. I appreciate all of you. I enjoy working on these projects, and I am glad you get something out of them. Your support means a lot :3

Have a good day!