Progress Report - April 22, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Batcat

Batcat is churning along right on course. All of the blocking animation is now finished, currently clocking in exactly two minutes longer than the storyboard iteration of the video. The storyboard ran 7:31, while the blocking runs 9:31.

I'm not quite sure how the blocking video ended up running 2 full minutes longer than the storyboard, but it did.

I have also installed all of the audio I have so far, which consists of all of Frances' audio (courtesy SultryLamp), and all of Selina's non-sex audio (courtesy InsideIncognita). I have no yet received Selina's sex audio, and notably I have not yet received any of Barbara's audio. I messaged Milly earlier this week about it, and she noted that she intended to get to it later that week. That hasn't come to pass yet, but we did also just have Easter weekend and she is very much a family-first person, so I'm not going to nag her over that. I will, however, send her another email tomorrow if I haven't gotten the audio back.

As I told her in that last email, I'm quickly running out of runway here.

For this next week, my goal is to build out all of the scenes and start lighting things. This will require a bit more custom asset work, namely for the streets outside Babs' apartment. I suspect they won't be nearly as intensive as the apartment building itself was though - all I need to do is widen an existing road asset, and add a dividing line down the middle. In theory that should be a quick in-and-out job.

There is also the far larger issue of what to do for the game that Selina is playing. But I'll be honest, I'm kicking that can down the road for now. Worse comes to worst, I will record some footage of me playing Supermarket Together (don't judge me) and toss it onto the screen in post. In the screenplay, she's playing Gas Station Simulator (don't judge Innie), but I don't own that game, am not particularly keen on dropping 12 bucks on it just to screen-record a few seconds of footage for the video, and don't like using gameplay footage from other people. But as I said, that's all stuff I'll figure out later.

After the scenes are built and lit, I'll start lip-syncing what all audio I have. I don't want to build gesticulations yet, because I might need to adjust the timings once Milly's audio for Barbara finally comes in, and gesticulations can be pretty timing sensitive - moving them around can be a real logistical challenge.

As things stand, I should definitely have all of the scenes built and lit, and hopefully all of Selina's non-sex lip-sync, done by this time next week. Hopefully Milly's audio will come in and I'll be able to make a head-start on that as well.

I'm hoping to at least have everything outside of the sex scene done by the end of the month. It is possible that I will be ready to render by the end of the first week of May, though that's starting to project too much for me to be comfortable with saying for any certainty.

There is still the matter of finding a sound designer, though. My last call for one fell on silent ears. I'll edit this one myself if I have to, but I'd really rather get the parallelism going on, of refining the animations while the sound design gets worked on by someone else. It just shaves a few weeks off the work-load.

But that's a bridge we'll cross as we get to it. I don't even have all of the audio in yet, so a sound designer couldn't even do anything right now.

Micros

Been making good progress on the Micros front, too! As of right now, I've got five Micros in various stages of completion in the pipe:

Marie/Honoka

Fully voiced, lip-synced, and gesticulated. Marie's outfit has been rebuilt to production standards, Honoka's needs a quick rerig. Project overall needs a quick polish pass on animation and lighting. Likely ready to release before the end of the month.

Claire/Jill

Fully blocked out, ready for voicing. Need to seek out a voice for Ada, and then discuss interest in voicing it with said Ada voice, SilkyMilk for Jill, and SultryLamp for Claire. Runs a bit long, at 95 seconds, but the earlier drafts without dirty-talk and the elevator-door sequence just felt incomplete to me. And it still fits within the Bluesky video limit so, fuck it. I'm still counting it as a Micro.

Will be the second Micro I release. For now, let's aim for end of May, though I have no date in mind. Three voices are a logistical challenge to corral (you've seen the issues I've been having with Batcat). Like with Marie/Honoka, I will spend more time just waiting for audio to come in than I will spend on the actual animation itself - and that is by design.

Parawhores

I've completely rewritten the previous pilot for Parawhores. I wanted a new position that better shows off Miya's huge tits (after all, by Miya's own account, her tits are the best part of her personality), and I've also rewritten the whole engagement to be more... engaging. I haven't yet blocked it all out yet, so I don't know if it will fit within 90 seconds (no way it'll fit within 60), but I'm optimistic. If I can fit it all in, then it's a much stronger debut for the characters than the previous pilot.

Not sure if this will be the third Micro though. Ideally, I would like to have this video be animated in Blender, so that I can use a physics simulation for a more realistic bounce on Miya's tits. SFM jigglebones are great for most things, but Miya's tits are at a size where the fact the jiggle is only approximated with 3 bones becomes painfully apparent. A full water-balloon simulation, to really get the nuances of breast deformation, would look a lot better for this.

And I've already decided I want my first Blender animation to be a Rebecca Chambers x tentacle animation. Mainly because Rebecca doesn't have a huge rack, meaning I don't have to worry about figuring out good breast simulations on top of everything else I need to learn for building full videos in Blender. And I've been wanting to do tentacles for years but they are a total bitch in SFM, whereas the early tests I've done with Blender's more sophisticated IK systems--to say nothing of curve-path conforming--suggests tentacles should be much easier to animate in Blender. And I want to try it out.

For now, I will tentatively put Parawhores as the third Micro. No release window in mind.

Bitchbreaker

Still in preproduction, I have the pilot Micro written out (as well as a few subsequent Micros written out). Been stuck in a bit of a limbo state, as I've been unsure what to do for her outfit - I want her massive horse cock to be easily accessible, since the gimmick of the project is she uses it to solve all her problems, but I also want it to be obscured so that she can whip it out for "surprise huge cock" jokes because I am not so pretentious as to pretend those aren't funny.

The image on the right is what I had originally kitbashed for her, and it readily solves the "easily accessible" issue, but you can't exactly pull a "surprise huge cock" joke when it's just hanging there for the world to see.

The center image is the reference I've been using, and it occurred to me just the other day that I can actually maintain the long loin-cloth (the length is important because Bitchbreaker has a literal knee-knocker) and make it easily accessible if I split the loincloth into two separate pieces of fabric. I only recently noticed that in the reference image, it is two pieces of material stitched together.

The idea I had was to remove the stitching, and just have them loosely layered atop each other. Under normal operation, they behave as one piece and obfuscates her massive dong. When it's time to draw her greatsword, the layers can simply part and she pokes through between them. It's honestly such an elegantly simple solution I'm a bit mad it didn't occur to me sooner.

However, because of the complexities of a loincloth (let alone two of them split and leaning up against her legs), I am now putting Bitchbreaker into the "want to animate in Blender" category. I fucking hate animating cloth by hand, and animating two separate long pieces of fabric as they rub up against her legs in full-bore thrusting sounds like a quick way to developing alcohol addiction. And I don't even drink.

So I very much want to be able to just mark the loin-cloth pieces as cloth and just the computer do all the hard with a cloth simulation. It'd be magnitudes faster than me animating it by hand, magnitudes less stressful than me animating it by hand, and would look magnitudes better than me animating it by hand.

Plus, as you can tell by the image, Bitchbreaker also has long hair that flows atop her chest (clipping through her chest in the image for rigging purposes - length-wise, it rests upon her breasts). Animating her in Blender means I can also run a cloth sim on her long hair, which will have all of the above benefits and will actually have proper collisions, so I won't have to spend 3 fucking days manually animating hair around shoulders like I did for Pharmmetra, to mixed results. And if I am going to be simulating her hair in Blender, then I'll probably end up making her hair even longer - ideally, I'd like her front braids to reach down to her nipples.

Where Parawhores is a "maybe animate in Blender", this is a "definitely animate in Blender". I just don't have the patience to animate that fucking split loincloth by hand. Mercy's loincloth in Overbreed was hell enough, and that was just one piece, and it was the back cloth so not nearly as affected by forward-thrusting motions. I ain't animating it in SFM. I just ain't.

Sultry's Elf

A project so early in pre-production, I don't even have a name for the character, let alone for the project itself.

I mentioned in last week's Progress Report that SultryLamp and I have been collaborating on putting together a semi-regular voiced project involving an original elf character. We spent a few days putting that elf character together to best fit Sultry's mental image of her, and this is what we ended up with.

I haven't even baked the body-shape down yet, that's how in-flux everything was. But she has given me green lights across the board, so eventually I will be baking this lady down and putting her together formally.

I have absolutely no idea what plans Sultry has for her. Only that she has them.

Hopefully in the coming weeks, there will be more elucidation and I will have more information to share on this collaboration. Or, at the very least, a name for the character.

Conclusion

Yeah. I think that's about it, really.

The train keeps a-rolling. There's some potential obstacles on the path ahead, between Milly's audio and the sound designer situation. But I'm going full-steam ahead regardless. We'll burn those bridges as we get to them.

That's all for now. Until next time, everyone!