Progress Report - February 24, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I was sick for literally the entirety of this past week. Thankfully it wasn't anything severe, just a particularly pernicious head-cold, but it genuinely started last Tuesday evening, shortly after I published the Progress Report, and it wasn't until this morning that I feel like I've fully kicked it. I thought I was over it on Friday, I felt pretty good, before Saturday slammed me face-first into the wall with the worst I'd felt all week.

As I said though, I think I'm finally through it, and so we're on the up-swing! Let's talk about what all I did manage to get done this past week, despite the rhinovirus's best efforts.

Overbreed

Not a whole lot to report for Overbreed proper. I implemented the proper save/load mechanism to the Transcript Processor, and I have sent out copies of the screenplays for naturalization.

For Mercy's Swiss German, a long-time Patron and a good friend of mine is a native Zuricher (the same region of Switzerland Mercy is canonically from - don't ask a Swiss German what they think of Mercy's English voice actress having a Standard High German accent despite supposedly being from Zurich) and graciously offered to sift through and naturalize her dialogue, so that it feels like something that a native Zuricher would feasibly say.

For Sombra's Mexican Spanish, I ended up asking another long-time friend of mine and semi-frequent asset contributor to my work, Ordagon. He is from Continental Spain (more accurately the Canary Islands), rather than Mexico, but he is also a fair bit of a linguist who has studied and is very aware of many different Spanish dialects around the world, including several Mexican dialects. And so I am confident that he will have a very faithful interpretation of naturalizing Sombra's Spanish to feel properly Mexican.

That's really all I have to report that is specific to Overbreed. I am hoping to hear back on the naturalizations on the first of the month, so we'll see how things go in that capacity.

Of course, that isn't to say I haven't been working on things that are productive toward Overbreed. But for that conversation, we need to talk about the...

Animation Layer System

In last week's Progress Report, I showed off the Animation Layer system I've been tinkering on for the past few weeks. In the time between then and now, I completely rewrote the entire system, up from first principles.

The bulk problem I was facing was that - for some reason I still don't fully understand - the pelvis handles were spawning in random positions at random rotations. For DVa, it was perfectly fine. For Symmetra, it was over her right thigh. For TF2 Heavy, it was about 5 feet to his left.

The position offsets meant that any rotations would cause the model to orbit around its point. For DVa, this was fine. For Symmetra, a bit wobbly. For TF2 Heavy, he became a perfect simulation of the ISS orbiting the Earth. This is obviously not tenable, and needed to be fixed.

The rotation offsets were in their own right insidious, though. Recall how last week I mentioned my intentions for swapping out animation sets, as a way to install Animation Layers into Overbreed (and other projects). Part of that requires copying over the pelvis rotations. And if the Animation Layer IK rig pelvis handle is set to a random rotation... I'm sure you can see the issue.

So, after a few failed attempts to patch the Animation Layer system I had shown off last week, and not only failing to fix anything but turning the code into a venerable rat's nest, I decided to take the nuclear option and just rebuild the whole thing.

And this time, I completely rebuilt it. I did not use the Valve IK rig as a base this time around, but started from literally the ground floor, of spawning a single handle at the map origin, figuring out - purely from first principles - how to position it overtop a bone, and going from there.

I'll spare you all the long, arduous, and boring details of the process, and instead just tell you that the rebuild was successful. It not only now functions correctly, but it actually functions better than the previous version, and is actually even more efficient than the Valve IK rig.

Which all leads into this post's preview image: I have the Animation Set Swapper working. With it, I can now seamlessly swap out the existing animation sets, using the old DazV5 rig that doesn't have any layers at all, with freshly-spawned animation sets using the new Animation Layer system with 4 animation layers, with absolutely zero effort on my part. All I need to do is type in the name of the old animation set, and the name of the new animation set, and press "Swap Models."

It handles everything. It copies over all of the animation data, including the keyframes. It copies over the bodygroup and skingroup settings. It copies over material overrides. It copies over all the locks - both the locks the old animation set has on the world, and the locks that other objects have to the old animation set. It deletes the old animation set and renames the new animation set to have the same name. Hell, it even places the new animation set in the same place in the Animation Set Editor as the old animation set.

The end result is a completely seamless replacement. The only evidence the tool did anything at all is that the new animation set seemingly disappears, as it silently swaps in and completely replaces the old animation set. And, of course, the fact that the "old" animation set now has the new IK rig controls, which in this case means the Animation Layers!

I only explicitly built the Animation Set Swapper to swap out identical copies of models, but the way it is built, it allows for more than just that. As a simple example, Overbreed Episode 1 started production before I had figured out how to make blush flexes for models. For technical reasons, if I add the blush to the existing Sombra and Mercy models, it will break their existing animations. And so, for the blush seen in Sequence B of Overbreed, I actually compiled a completely separate version of Mercy, aptly named "mercy_dazv5-blush".

While the blush version of Mercy is technically a different model than what is used in Overbreed Sequence C (the one with Sombra), I can seamlessly swap out the old blush-less Mercy with the new blush-capable Mercy. Everything transfers over seamlessly, since animation transfers are done by control name - the blush not being on the old model simply means it has no animation to transfer over. So in effect, Mercy gains the ability to blush, without me having to do anything!

But I can go much further than that. I can technically swap out any model. Here's Mercy fucking Kate from Life is Strange.

Everything transferred over seamlessly. The animation, the locks, everything. I didn't have to so much as realign a single bone.

Hilariously, Sombra's hair and outfit actually resnapped themselves to Kate. I hid them for this image, but they are technically there and attached to Kate, and fully move with her. They obviously don't fit her well, because Kate has an entirely different body shape than Sombra. But the outfit moves with her.

Such extreme model swaps are not and were not my intent with this tool. As it is right now, I can't guarantee they'll work flawlessly. I know from testing that if the models have different bone rotations, then things get distorted - Barney will have nightmares about swapping out Sombra with Doctor Kleiner for months. And I think that, in its current iteration, it will be crushing bone positions to keep everything aligned, meaning swapping out Sombra for someone taller like Brigitte or Zarya would probably result in them getting crunched down into awkward little midget versions of themselves.

I could, and later might, fix that by only copying over rotations, but again - this isn't my focus right now. My only goal with the Animation Set Swapper right now is to upgrade Overbreed (and nominally all of my other projects) to be using the latest Animation Layer system, to make my life easier when it comes to lip-syncing and detailing them.

In fact, on that "nominal" note, I have also done some prototypical testing of upgrading my other projects. Love and Degeneracy, for example, uses the old Animation Layer system, with a single animation layer. As it is, out of the box, swapping the models out loses any animation that was applied to that old animation layer - which I use extensively in Love and Degeneracy, for sweeping motions like Chloe and Max looking at each other and then looking away.

This is because, as I said earlier, the Animation Set Swapper swaps controls by name. And the old 1-layer system used the name "rig_biped_spine_L" to refer to the animation layer bones. The new 4-layer system, by contrast, uses the name "rig_biped_spine_L1". Because "L" and "L1" are not the same name, the animation isn't copied over.

However, I did some crude testing of it, by manually renaming the old animation-layer bones to match the names of the new Animation Layer system, and that does allow a full transfer of the layer animation, entirely correct and in-tact.

So the next thing I plan to do with the Animation Set Swapper is add a system for renaming controls on the old animation set before the swap, and then adding a preset system for it. That way, I can write in the renames for the old 1-layer system exactly once, save it as a preset, and then use it to upgrade any of my projects using the 1-layer system.

Off the top of my head, that means Love and Degeneracy, Pharmmetra, Short Love Story, and Primordium will all be effortlessly upgradeable, alongside Overbreed.

To say that I'm excited about this development is an understatement. It isn't anything outwardly visible, but it will make my life as an animator significantly less stressful, and will make lip-syncing and detailing these projects go much faster. Which is always a win, even if it isn't flashy.

Love and Degeneracy

Beyond all of the Animation Layer system shenaniganery, I have also been working with my sound designer on the final touches to Love and Degeneracy's Chapter 1.

We have locked in a final sound-design solution for the episode itself. He added such effective bed-squeaking sounds, in fact, that I actually went back to the already-finished animation and painstakingly swapped out the old, unrigged bed with the alternate rigged bed I had put together, and then animated some good and proper rocking-and-rolling to the bed, to better match the fantastic sound design he added.

And I have to say, it looks so much better with the rigged bed. It was a proper pain in the dick to put together, but it was absolutely worth it.

We are now in the process of figuring out the series teaser sound design.

More specifically, he's gotten all of the actual sound effects and Foley for the teaser done (and it sounds fantastic). What we're stuck on is figuring out the right music for the 17-second series introduction. This is the first proper impression of the series that people will get, and we both want to get it right.

We've explored some soft acoustic compositions, reminiscent of the game's soundtrack. We tried more indie folk rock, like the iconic Syd Matter track "Obstacles" that is sort of the unofficial themesong of the game. We experimented with more nu-metal takes in the veins of Linkin Park or Korn (we both full-heartedly believe Chloe is absolutely a nu-metal gal). Nothing was really sticking though - while the tracks were great, they just didn't really match the energy of the intro animation.

Right now, we are in the process of experimenting with shoegaze. The initial experiments have been promising, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Hopefully by this time tomorrow, we'll have a complete piece that we can judge.

Once the sound design for the series intro is figured out, the last thing I want to do before the proper release is bodge together a placeholder page for the public episodic releases of these Micro Chapters. Since I am not nearly as proficient a web developer as my, well, web developer is, the early-access Patreon videos will not be watchable through my website - you will have to get them directly from the Patreon release post(s). The website will only be for the public releases.

I don't expect that to take long, and I don't expect it to be pretty. I suspect the most difficult part will be talking with my web developer and bodging a referring link into his fancy pretty functional Films page to link to my jank-ass ugly broken Micros page. He and I really need to get the site overhaul finished and published.

I am hoping that all of this will only take a few days. I would love to have the first episode go live for Early Access sometime later this week. But I'm not going to make any promises or commitments. We'll play it out by ear.

At any rate, that's all I have for you all this week. Until next week, everyone!