Progress Report - April 29, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Batcat

Last week, I noted how my primary goal for this week was to get all of the scenes built and lit, with a secondary goal of getting a headstart on lip-syncing, and aspirations of getting the last of the audio in.

As you can tell by this post's head image, all four of the main scenes of the Batcat video have been fully built and lit! And I have to say, I am quite impressed with how they turned out. The street build wasn't nearly as challenging as I had feared it would be, only needing the model-work I had already known it would need - namely, rigging up the road model so that I can adjust its width to allow for street parking.

Barbara's apartment, surprisingly, required a fair bit more model work. Of the two, I expected the street to be far harder to build just due to its scale, but Babs' apartment ended up taking about twice as long. I had to make a modified version of the apartment exterior wall to be used for the interior, and spent an unnecessary amount of time building the column seen in the corners. The furniture also required a fair bit of bespoke work done, to fit the very explicit image that Innie had painted in her original manuscript.

Unfortunately, I didn't get around to getting any lip-sync done. That is this week's goal. And I suppose it's just as well, seeing how I haven't heard anything from Milly yet, and Innie is still working on getting the last bit of audio to me.

We're just about out of runway now, and I'll be honest, I'm starting to get nervous about these audio delays. Innie's delays less so, since at least I have the bulk majority of her audio installed and able to be processed. But without any of Milly's audio, I can't do anything with Barbara. And seeing how central she is to the first two-thirds of the video, that's a bit concerning.

But alas, it's out of my hands for now. As long as she can get the audio to me before I run out of things to do, it's not a problem. And if she doesn't... well, that's a bridge I will cross if I have to, though I'd really rather not.

DOAFantasy

I'm still casually hacking away at my big DOAFantasy project. In recent weeks I decided to reassess my ideas for the ladies. About half of them had gimmicks that, while fun, aren't really conducive to my bigger plans for them.

The main thing was that I intend for each of them have a dedicated sex sequence, and I want each of them to be unique in some way. And while the ladies in question had unique gimmicks, they weren't really things you could make a sex scene out of.

For example, Helena being a casual cum-guzzler is fun, but you can't really make a 10-minute sex scene out of that - it's purely a finisher, lasting only a few seconds at the end of the sex scene. Yeah, Helena eats cum, that's great. But how does she get the cum? That is what I want to figure out.

Several of the ladies went under similar scrutiny. Kokoro being a stripper who keeps getting fired for fucking her clients is fun, but there is nothing inherent in her being a stripper that makes the sex itself interesting - if you remove the stripper context, what makes her sex scenes unique? Similarly, Tina canonically being a porn star is a fun narrative setup, but at the end of the day, they're all technically porn stars - it's a porn project. So what makes Tina's sex scenes unique from all the others?

As part of this endeavor, I have finally moved my hodgepodge of notes into the homebrew character-card wiki system I think I showed off some weeks ago[1]. You can see what all I have for them by clicking here. You will note that there are still gaps - a few ladies are fully figured out, a few are complete mysteries, and most of them are about 90% of the way figured.

If anyone has any thoughts or ideas for any of the ladies, I would absolutely love to hear them. You can drop your thoughts in the comments below, or DM me them if you'd prefer. Or you can reach out on Bluesky for that matter. I don't use Twitter anymore, so don't message me there.

I'd really like to start making videos in this big DOAFantasy story (I have several written out, including several Micros), but as I mentioned last week when talking about Miya and Parawhores, SFM jigglebones are really at their limits when it comes to the DOAFantasy ladies. They work fine for most tiddies, but the DOAFantasy ladies' racks are not most tiddies.

I really want to figure out how to get a full soft-body simulation on them, so they can properly bounce and deform, in Blender. Which means I need to spend more time figuring out a Blender workflow, which isn't in the schedule until after Batcat is released. Soon.

[1] Apparently, I never actually uploaded this anywhere for people to navigate. I teased it on Bluesky, but never linked it. So, this is a fresh upload of everything. Feel free to navigate around and see what else I have. Just keep in mind that these are all internal notes, and as such are subject to change. Nothing is a commitment, unless I explicitly say it is.

Marie / Honoka

This Micro is very close to being released. All of the animation is fully finished, and I am currently working on in-engine sound design. I noted on Bluesky the other day that I really fucking suck at Foley sound design, and my efforts on this Micro honestly sound pretty bad. I really need to find a new sound designer to pay for this. I am many things, but a Foley engineer is not one of them.

I mentioned last week that the only major bit of work that was needed was rerigging Honoka's outfit. Specifically, I needed to rerig the skirt, which are notoriously challenging to rig in a way that conforms to the character's movement (as opposed to being independently rigged and needing to be manually animated).

The way I have rigged skirts historically is by starting with a weight transfer, and then manually adjusting the weights for the space in between the legs (where the weight transfer just has to guess), to get a clean deform. The problem with high-poly skirts is that, well, they're high-poly. That's a lot of weights to adjust.

On a whim, I had the idea of making a really crude low-poly approximation of the skirt, and rigging that, instead of the high-poly skirt. Then, once the low-poly skirt has its weights adjusted so that it deforms properly, I can then transfer the low-poly weights onto the high-poly skirt. In theory, because the low-poly skirt doesn't have those empty spaces like the character does, the high-poly skirt should deform a lot better. The thought was, it takes a lot less time to adjust 30 vertex weights, than it does to adjust 30,000 vertex weights.

It worked amazingly well, as you can see by the above image. This is with zero adjustments on the final high-poly skirt. Just a raw weight transfer. It's not 100% perfect, but it got me 95% of the way there. After this image was made, I spent maybe 10 minutes fixing the few problem areas.

And this is the end result in SFM. Looks absolutely fantastic, and more importantly, I don't have to manually pose and animate the fucking skirt.

Of course, there is an extremely cruel irony in me figuring this out just now: this will likely be the last skirt I ever rig for SFM.

The idea of using a low-poly approximation for rigging the skirt actually came from my earlier Blender experiments, where I found that using a low-poly approximation for cloth simulations worked exceptionally well. In Blender, rather than running the cloth sim directly on the outfit, I found that it works better to make a simple plane mesh that is roughly in the shape of the outfit and run the cloth sim on that, and then simply Mesh Deform the final outfit onto the plane mesh.

I figured, if it works so well for cloth sims, maybe it would work well for rigging, too. And so I tried it, and so it does.

The irony, of course, is that I used a cloth-sim approach for something that I would just... cloth sim. Why would I use a cloth-sim approach for something inferior to a cloth sim? In any situation where I find myself needing to make a cloth-sim approximation for an outfit, I'd rather just use a cloth sim.

I mentioned in the previous post, when talking about Bitchbreaker's split loincloth, how I have absolutely zero interest in rigging those skirts and hand-animating them, and how in the future I intend to just cloth-sim it and have Blender do all the hard work of animating it. How a cloth sim is faster, easier, and looks better.

All of that logic applies to skirts, and anything else I would apply this low-poly approximation technique to. Why would I rig a skirt when I can just cloth-sim it?

And so, this will likely by the last skirt I rig for SFM, because the plan is for any future skirts to be relegated to cloth simulations in Blender.

Reset Sleep Schedule

The only other thing of note is a personal thing: I reset my sleep schedule this past Thursday into Friday, and so far, it seems to be sticking.

For the past month and change, it's slipped to the point that I was going to bed at 8am. Not waking up, going to sleep. And then getting up around 3pm. This in itself isn't necessarily an issue - so long as I get enough sleep, it doesn't really matter when the sleep is had.

The issue is that most people don't operate on this schedule, and so when I need to interact with other people, scheduling becomes a real issue. This came to a head earlier this week, when my friends and I made plans to meet up in two weeks' time. The meetup would require me to be on the road and driving for 2 hours by 9am.

Going to bed at 8am, and being awake and driving at 9am. The math doesn't math.

And so I didn't sleep at all Thursday into Friday, waking up at 3pm on Thursday and going to bed at 1130pm Friday, staying up 33 hours, only to then get up at 7am Saturday morning. The goal is to shift my sleep schedule to be going to bed around midnight, and getting up at 8am.

It's now Tuesday morning, 3 days after the reset, and so far it's worked smashingly well. By the time 11pm rolls around I am quite literally falling asleep in my chair. I legitimately fell asleep in the middle of a boss fight playing Menace From the Deep last night. Which is a good thing.

Now the question is, how long will that last?

Conclusion

I think that's about it for this week's Progress Report. I haven't made much headway on any other projects, like the elf project with Sultry. I'm hoping to spend some time this week on that, if I can find it.

Goal for this week is to get all of the audio I currently have lip-synced. Hopefully all of Milly's audio for Barbara, and Innie's sex-scene audio for Selina, will come in over the course of the week. I am excluding that from this week's lip-sync goal.

I also want to finish off the last of the in-engine sound design on Marie/Honoka and get the render started by end-of-day May 1. I'd like to get the Micro posted onto Bluesky (and Patreon) before next week's Progress Report.

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