[WIP, NSFW] Reisen tentacles pt 2 (Patreon)

More progress on this. Small lighting error I've noticed, but that's easy to fix. First things first, I wanted to ask for some feedback. The way the shadows are structured, they're easy for me to manipulate (I'll go into detail below). This also means I have a lot of flexibility.

What I was wondering is what angle of shadows work best. I have two examples below; I'm able to swap between them or adjust the shape and colors of the shadows effortlessly. So, given that, what do you all think makes more sense and works better?

On a related note, I'm trying to think of things for her to do in the later gifs; e.g., reading a book "how to care for your tentacle spawn" etc.

If you're curious about how I structured this, read on:

Each drawing layer in toon boom has 4 sublayers: overlay, lineart, colour, and underlay. I use lineart to underlay for drawing.

Overlay is reserved for highlighted areas, which are colored in bright pink. Layers pass through to compositions and are carried over, so when I separate them using layer separation nodes, it can remove those layers from everything within a comp.

So, I split the animation into two paths. On one, I use a layer selector to remove JUST the overlay layer, and then color shift it to the shaded value. I'll call this the primary composite.

On the other, I replace all colors, save for the overlay color, with black. The overlay becomes white. I run it through what's called a grayscale node, which has a setting to output a matte based on the B/W values. This basically generates a mask for me to use.

I can then combine these as I need. I can use the mask to cut out a section of the primary composite that isn't subjected to the color changes, or I can use it  with a blending mode like Screen or Multiply to lighten or darken what it overlays with.

Since the overlay components are part of each object, and I flatten the image via a BMP composite before doing the grayscale/BW effects, highlights that are obscured by other components are properly hidden. If I didn't flatten it to a BMP beforehand, highlights on the stomach for instance would show above the breasts.