Progress Report - June 10, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Main PC is online again!

I cannot overstate how nice it is to not have to daily-drive the old render PC anymore. I can actually have more than 4 lights active at a time again!!! I don't have to turn off the scene and outfits to move lights anymore!!! I can actually play back the animations with lights off and get a framerate that's not measured in seconds-per-frame!!!

In actuality, this new CPU is actually a fair bit more powerful than my previous one. SFM's viewports are predominantly CPU-bound, and so the CPU makes the difference in how well actually working in SFM behaves. From a half dozen or so reports I looked at, it seems like the Ryzen 9950X is about 40% more powerful than the Ryzen 5950X I replaced, and I honestly can feel it.

I can actually play back animations, in real time, with full lighting and ambient occlusion, at nearly 30 frames per second. Which I certainly couldn't do before, and as actually pretty wild, considering that's a higher framerate than I render my videos at out, which is 24 frames per second.

So not only am I back to the level of performance that I was at before having to move to the render PC, I am actually surpassing it. SFM honestly feels a bit weird running so smooth.

It took me about half the day to light the first 200 seconds of the first Batcat project file on the render machine, with most of that time being the constant juggling, lagging, and waiting. It took me less than 2 hours to light the back 200 seconds on the main PC.

Very technically, we're not back to exactly 100%. I still need to call Microsoft and get my Windows reactivated. Windows doesn't like it when you swap out the motherboard and the CPU underneath it, and simply reinserting the Windows product key isn't working for reactivating it. It's not difficult, I've done it before, I just need to do it.

And until about 20 minutes ago, I was stuck to using my wired IEMs for audio - my bluetooth earbuds refused to connect to this PC. In the rare event they'd even get picked up, connecting it would time out with a "device did not respond" error. In the end, it turns out that the built-in bluetooth antenna that comes with the AORUS X870E Elite motherboard fucking sucks.

When I went to add a Bluetooth device, it was picking up one device (sometimes), and it wasn't even my earbuds. I finally decided to pull out the PCIe Bluetooth adapter that I bought so my old render PC could have Bluetooth (its a 15-year-old machine, long before Bluetooth was a standard motherboard feature) and stick it into this machine (a PCIe x1 device in a PCIe x16 slot looks unnatural). Adding a Bluetooth device immediately filled out the list with a scrollbar, picking up 16 or so devices. And, more importantly, my Bluetooth earbuds were immediately picked up and connected without issue.

So, I guess the moral of the story here is, if you're buying an AORUS X870E Elite motherboard, and you use Bluetooth earbuds, just save yourself the headache and buy a PCIe Bluetooth adapter. Don't even bother trying to get it to connect to the Bluetooth that comes with the motherboard.

And then finally, my new case hasn't arrived yet, and isn't slated to until sometime between June 16 and July 1. So right now, all of my cables are just hanging loose and my PC is running with the case open because I physically can't put the side panel back on it. It's a very quick and dirty assembly. Once the new case arrives, I will be transplanting the build into and properly cable-manage it then.

With all of that said:

Batcat is back on schedule!

I deeply, deeply apologize for this 2-week detour. But now that my PC is back online, I am running full tilt on Batcat again.

The lighting is fully finalized now (I double-checked and tuned everything as needed yesterday, since recall I couldn't actually have all of the lights on at the same time on the render PC). The next step is to quickly fix the outfit clipping (you can see it in the preview GIF), and then I throw in the detail animations, choreo the camera, bake down jiggles, and hit the big bad render button.

Unless things go catastrophically wrong, I should be ready to fire off the final 4K render by next week's Progress Report.

And in the wake of what all just transpired, that "unless things go catastrophically wrong" is not just an empty consolation. Seeing how the last time I said that, my fucking motherboard fried two days later and put us into a two-week holding pattern. 💀

Micros Update

I've gotten BordeauxBlack on board to return as Ciri in the Witcher Micro, which I am hoping to finish the animations for this week. And I've put together a first draft of the next Marie/Honoka Micro. And these two Micros bring up a fundamental disconnect I need to internally resolve with the Micros.

The Witcher Micro is 120 seconds, and it has taken me about 2 weeks of focused working on it to put together. The Honoka Micro is 150 seconds, and it took me one evening to put together, the space between my eating dinner and my going to dinner Sunday night.

As you can tell, there is no clear relation between the runtime of these Micros and their production times. And that is because of their content. The Witcher Micro consists of 8 sex animations, 2 climax animations, and a rather complicated unique animation in the card-drawing-and-flipping sequence. The Honoka animation consists of 1 sex animation, 1 climax animation, and a simple unique animation in Honoka grabbing and looking at her phone.

The title of "Micro video" is a bit of a misnomer of intent. The goal of Micro videos isn't necessarily to be really short (not anymore, anyways - that was the goal with Bluesky's 1-minute video limit, but now that it has been raised to 3 minutes, I've relaxed that requirement). Instead, the goal of Micro videos is for them to be easy for me to quickly put together, to provide a content drip as I work on Shorts (which have been averaging 2 months of production time, not taking into account shit like my fucking motherboard dying on me).

Put another way, Micros are meant to be quick to make, not necessarily quick to watch.

I'd like to rename the Micros to better reflect this, but I think, at least for now, I will continue using the nomenclature. It's established and at least fundamentally easy to understand: they're shorter than Short videos, which clock in between 5 and 10 minutes (we don't talk about TO BREED & BOND being 15 minutes 💀). Even if that isn't what being Micros is about, it is a consequence, and it's a lot easier to understand than "this video was quick to make", since people have an intuitive sense of correlating runtime to production time - if a video is twice as long, it must have taken twice as long to make.

I still need to edit the Honoka Micro draft together, but that'll only take an hour or so to get done tonight. I contemplated holding off and sharing it with this post, but this post is already a day late as it is. So next week, ya'll will get a proper preview of the Honoka Micro.

And then finally, no updates on Suki and her Micro anthology. I might tinker with her a bit more over the next week, but once Batcat is cleared then I will have more time to full-throatedly work on her.

Conclusion

So, to quickly wrap it all up then: main PC is back online, Batcat is back on schedule and I am hoping to start the 4k render next week, the Witcher Micro is coming along and I've written a new Honoka Micro out.

That's all for now!

Until next week, everyone!