Progress Report - June 2, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

PC Update

I noted in last week's Progress Report that my main PC had died on me the Thursday of the week before, and that I was hoping to get it back that upcoming Thursday. If you follow me on Bluesky then you likely already know how that went, but the TLDR is that guy I had looking at it wasn't able to do anything for it - motherboard is dead as a doornail.

Between the bizarre stability problems I've had with the thing for the past year now, and the fact that it is on a deprecated socket anyways, I decided to use this as an opportunity to upgrade a bit earlier than I otherwise would. With the brand new PSU I had bought in my attempts to fix the stability issues in tow, I will be transferring over my RTX 3080 and my various hard-drives to an entirely build: a new motherboard, new CPU, and new DDR5 RAM.

And it will all be transferred into a shiny new case to boot. The case I am currently using, a first-generation NZXT Phantom, is a wonderful case, but it's 15 years old now. PC building paradigms have changed a lot in the past decade and a half. Most notably, cable management has become much more important now, and cases have been built to make it clean and easy. There's also the simple fact that GPUs have gotten absolutely fucking massive now. I just want something that's a bit more spacious to work in - I don't think this case will be able to physically fit whatever the next generation GPU happens to be.

I have the new parts on order now, and received an email earlier today saying they had shipped, with an arrival ETA on this upcoming Thursday. The case is going to be a few weeks further out yet, with the delivery window being anywhere between June 16 and July 1. But in the meantime, I intend to do a quick-and-dirty build into the Phantom, just to get the PC up and running again. It won't be pretty, with cables hanging loose, but it'll just be a temporary solution until the new case arrives, wherein the parts will be transplanted and properly managed.

Speaking of temporary solutions, I am still on the old backup render PC that I mentioned last week. Thankfully, since I now have my main PC physically back with me, I've been able to pull a few parts from it to at least make this old PC usable. Most notably, I pulled the work drive - where all of my SFM and 3dsmax files resided - and plugged it into this machine, meaning I have total access to all of my animation and model work. I also pulled the PCIe Bluetooth adapter that I had bought trying to fix Bluetooth audio latency issues, meaning I have audio again - the sound chip on this old PC is fried, so I can't run any wired audio, meaning that entire week waiting for my PC I had no audio, and it was driving me insane. And then finally, I pulled my mouse micro-USB off the main PC, meaning I was able to toss the absolutely miserable wireless trackpad keyboard I was using, and have a proper mouse and keyboard again. Combine all of that with plugging in my second monitor, and at least my user experience is back to what it was.

I considered swapping my RTX 3080 over into this PC as well, to give myself more graphics power. But, considering how this old PC can barely fit its GTX 980...

There is no physical way I'd ever get that RTX 3080 into this case. So I'm stuck with the cooked 980 (a bad power supply scorched it many years ago, crippling it and making it not able to run anything much more intense than Source games - it's why the whole PC was replaced back then).

Which is a clean a segue into the next section of the post as any. So let's get to it.

Batcat Update

As I mentioned, I have access to my work drive now, meaning I have access to all of my animation projects. Including Batcat. So I am not entirely stuck in limbo, as I was last week. I can get work done Batcat.

Or, I can attempt to at least.

I'm not sure what exactly the problem is, if it's just this old CPU being tired and worn, if it's the scorched GPU being pushed to its limits, or if it's the 8GB of DDR3 RAM struggling to keep up, but I cannot have many things active in SFM before the framerate tanks down into "seconds per frame" territory. And I mean, I can't even have Selina, her hair, and her outfit on screen at once - I have to turn one of them off in order to get framerates in the double-digits. And that's with lighting disabled.

And forget being able to navigate the camera with the scenebuild enabled.

All of this makes working on Batcat extremely slow. I can do it - see this post's header image - but it requires me constantly turning things on and off. For finalizing the lighting on the shots shown above, I had to turn off Selina's outfit and the entire scenebuild, position the light, turn the outfit and scenebuild on, see how it looked, turn the outfit and scenebuild off, adjust the light, turn the outfit and scenebuild on, rinse and repeat.

As if that extremely inefficient way to light scenes wasn't difficult enough, this PC also has a problem where I cannot have more than 4 shadowed lights active at a time. The moment it exceeds 4, what I can only describe as a Shadow Demon haunts the scene.

The Shadow Demon is a projecting of everything currently drawing, meaning that for testing lighting in the full scenebuilds, the Shadow Demon is a copy of the entire scene. It results in wonderfully delightful experiences such as this:

As if just having massive black squares cutting through the scene at oblique angles wasn't bad enough, the Shadow Demons actually cast shadows themselves. You can see how Selina's neck is darker in the bottom image, because the Shadow Demon is blocking light.

So not only dos it make it difficult to see, it actually changes the lighting in its own right. Meaning that I can't work with the Shadow Demon at all. Which in turn means I have to turn off different lights and then just sort of guess how they would all look combined. Which is obviously not ideal.

So while I can get the lighting tightened up significantly on this PC, I am not confident enough to render it out 4k on this machine. That will have to wait until the new PC is built and online.

As of now, I have gotten all of the lighting on the last two scenes of the video finished. I decided to start with them, since they're relatively simple and I figured they'd be a better test if this PC was even capable of it. To which, the answer seems to be, "barely."

Up next is finalizing the lighting of the main scene. After that, all that remains on my end animation-wise is choreographing the camera and adding the detail animations. There is also some model-work I need to do, in fixing outfit clipping.

However, because I can't actually preview the animations (again, measured in seconds per frame here), that means I can't do the detail animations on this old PC. I will try to choreograph the camera, and I can safely do the outfit work. But the detail animating will also have to wait for the main PC to be online.

Which unfortunately means that we are, at a minimum, stuck until this upcoming weekend before I can start the final 4k render. In reality, it will be even longer, as I will have to do a once-over on all of the lighting, and do all the detail animations that I can't do on this PC. So, more realistically, it won't be until sometime the following week before the final render 4k can begin.

On an upside, I have reviewed the first pass of the sound design for the video, and PornSFX did a fantastic job. There's still more work to be done with it - namely, I feel like he had too light a touch and was too conservative with the audio work. I love the work he did, but I want even more. The soundscape as it is sounds a bit empty.

So when the video is finally done, it will at the very least sound fantastic.

Suki Update

I mentioned that pulling my work drive restored my access to my model work as well, and I wasted no time in leveraging that to finally start building Suki, the original character I had spent a week writing several individual episodes for.

The first thing I did was focus on updating her face textures. I mentioned that she is using Sakura's face, from Kiss of War, which is a mobile game. And boy howdy did her face textures reflect that. They're pretty good for a mobile game, make no mistake. But they're not exactly hero-texture quality. And so the first thing I did was upscale her face texture by compositing three different upscaling algorithms, and then spend far more time than I care to admit transplanting new eyebrows and lips onto her, to bring them up to a higher level of fidelity.

That ended up being more work than I care to admit, because Sakura's bottom lip UV was in a really unfortunate spot, with the texture seam being very obvious when looking at her with the new higher-fidelity lips. And so I ended up having to reUV her mouth a bit to get it to behave better.

And then as a final swipe, I decided to remove the makeup from her eyes as well, get her face completely natural. That way, I can build my own makeup for her, which I have plans to do yet. In the end, here is how she looked out of the box, and how she looks with my efforts.

With her face textures brought up to a fidelity I was happy with, the next thing to do was get her hair sorted.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to give her a fauxhawk with frosted tips. The problem was finding such a hairstyle. None of my usual resources had any, and I was only be able to find a single resource for it - as a Mass Effect 3 mod, which are notoriously difficult to extract from (harder than extracting from the base game actually), and I didn't want to bother with.

So, I decided to use this as justification for taking the plunge and learning how to model hair myself. I've wanted to do it myself for years, but have always been too daunted to take on the task - especially with other hair resources by far more skilled artists than I readily available. But with no other avenues available to me, I decided to bite the bullet.

I found this absolutely fantastic tutorial by Lewis Sanderson, which covers not only the 3dsmax portions of it, but even painting the hair in Photoshop. His process for painting the hair was so disgustingly simple and clean, I simply had to try it. And, against all odds, it actually worked out really well. I needed to adjust a few things to fit a mouse, since he uses a tablet, but other than that, it worked fantastically.

Over the course of the weekend, I modeled Suki's fauxhawk completely from scratch, all the way down the textures. And I have to say, I am extremely pleased with the result.

I originally made the hair blonde so I could easily see the roots. After spending two days modeling the hair with it blonde, I then made the hair predominantly her natural hair color, with just the frosted tips. But it was honestly really hard to see her hair because of the dark color, and I had gotten so used to the blonde hair, that I decided to reverse the coloring gradient - rather than black hair with blonde tips, I decided to make it blonde hair with black roots. And I like it so much that I think that this is what I am going to ship Suki's hair as.

The last thing I've managed to get done tonight, after finishing off the Batcat lighting shown here, was putting together her body. I mentioned previously that I intended to build her physique loosely after Bella Bellz, and that includes her absolute dump-truck of an ass.

Suki is not a large woman, and she is approximately 70% ass by volume. I've already written several episodes where Suki's ass is a primary motivator for the escapades, from all parties involved - men, women, and even Suki herself.

Up next is putting together all of her tattoos, and then her makeup afterwards. This is where Bella Bellz once again comes into play as a key reference, for both tattoos and makeup:

I have a full set of tattoos planned out for her, so putting them all together should be fairly straightforward. Her makeup is less settled, though makeup is also generally a lot simpler to put together. The only thing I really know I want is for Suki to have very vibrant lipstick, since a recurring theme of her series is that she always leaves behind a calling card behind when she hits the road - her name, written in lipstick, and sealed with a kiss.

I expect that I will have her tattoos and makeup, as well as her various planned piercings, done by next week's Progress Report. And hopefully that Progress Report will come with it news of the 4k render finally being just around the corner.

On that note, I really do want to apologize to everyone. We were right around the corner of rendering when my PC shit itself, and it's now been 2 weeks and counting of just being on the edge of this video finally being done.

I desperately want to get my production schedule back on the 4-to-6-week train. But it seems like every time I try, there's always something that fucks it all up. It sucks, and I'm sorry.

No matter how unhappy you may be with how things have turned out with the Batcat video's production time, trust me, I'm unhappier with it.

At any rate, that's all for now. Until next week, everyone. Hopefully we will finally get this train back on the rails.