Progress Report - April 7, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Ah, it feels nice to be able to write the actual date again!

This will be another relatively short Progress Report. We'll go over the ongoing release of Love and Degeneracy, a brief Overbreed update, and a quick look into other things I've got cooking. Let's get right to it, shall we?

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So up first, Love and Degeneracy. Episode 3 saw its early-access release on schedule, on April 3rd, alongside its Episode 2 public release. Episode 4 is already well underway in polishing, with all of the lip-sync (both dialogue and non-dialogue) finished. Today saw me finish up Chloe's dialogue animation, with Max's slated for tomorrow, and David and Joyce on Thursday. I expect I should be pretty much finished with all of the animation (including detail animation and camera animation) by end-of-day Saturday, and be ready for the final 4k render come Monday.

Of course, a lot can happen between now and then, but that is the current projection, based on how things have gone so far on this episode, and how the previous episodes went.

Not too much more to report there. Everything is cooking right along.

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Next up, Overbreed. As this week's preview image probably insinuated, audio has started trickling in over the week. Bordeaux's audio for Zarya in Sequence A came in a few days ago, though I am awaiting Milly's audio before I start processing it with gusto.

And just last night, Sultry's first batch of audio for Moira came in. As always, she did an absolutely fantastic job, to the point I had to sit and closely listen to Moira's in-game lines to convince myself I didn't unwittingly hire Genevieve Reilly herself for the role. Since Moira's lines are purely narrative, and as such are completely decoupled from timing--meaning I can easily move them around if I need to, without it fucking anything up--I have elected to process her audio first.

As you can see, I have already made some headway on lip-syncing her audio. Click here for the audio version of the gif. I'm hoping to have all of Moira's audio for Narrative B lip-synced by end-of-day Saturday. Amusingly, her audio came in for lip-syncing within an hour of my finishing lip-syncing L&D Episode 4. It seems I just can't escape lip-syncing this week.

I have also heard rumblings from Cinder, suggesting she may have her first batch of Sombra audio coming in the next few days. Similarly, Milly suggested she was going to try and have her first batch of Mercy audio recorded and sent in by end-of-day tomorrow. Whether or not that actually comes to pass is always an exciting mystery with Milly, of course, but I know that it will eventually come, and she will do a fantastic job as she always does.

I intend to send off the second batch of Moira lines later tonight, and if the last batch's turnaround is anything to go by, then hopefully by this time next week, I will have the last of Moira's audio installed and under the process of lip-syncing.

After a few weeks of just kinda sitting awkwardly in place as I get everything ready, Overbreed is once again lurching into forward motion. It's very exciting watching all the audio come in, bit by bit. I can tell already, this is going to be magical. I hope you all enjoy the final video even half as much as I have enjoyed putting it together. Even if it did take checks calendar five goddamn years to get this far.

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And then finally, a quick update on things beyond the two animations currently in production.

Last week, I discussed the beginnings of the Blender Scene Pipeline. I've made decent progress with it, though there were a few complications that arose as I was testing the scene importing, that ended up taking a few days longer to solve than I anticipated.

The first complication was that apparently REDxEYE's SourceIO importer handles models that are compiled with $static_prop uniquely from other model imports. I won't go into the details of what that flag does or why it's there. The only relevant aspects of this story are that I don't use it, Valve does it use, many scenebuild packs use it, and that SourceIO treats models with it differently from other models.

Specifically, SourceIO doesn't create an armature for models with $static_prop, while it does for all other models. The entirety of the Scene Pipeline operates on armatures, which obviously causes a problem with models that don't have them. So I had to spend some time first figuring out that even was the problem, and then some more time figuring out how to correct that issue, which is in itself not a trivial matter, because SourceIO only returns the generated armature when it imports a model (and as such, returns nothing at all when importing a $static_prop model). It does not report the meshes imported, nor the collections they are sorted into. So I had to manage all that on my own.

Once I finally got all that figured out, I quickly ran into another problem, which is that apparently SourceIO applies some undisclosed transforms on the armatures it does generate. Obviously, it doesn't apply those to the armatures I have to make myself. And, importantly, the transforms it does apply results in the later transforms I apply behaving differently between the SourceIO-generated armatures and the armatures I generate.

So I had to spend a few more days figuring out what all transforms I have to apply to the $static_prop armatures to get the same behavior as on the SourceIO-generated armatures. In the end, I elected to build two separate code paths for the two different types of model. They both get abstracted under the same interface, but the implementations are independent and bespoke for each type. Different code, same outcome.

All of which is to say, I got a good bit of work done on Blender Pipeline, for very little forward progress. But hey, I can import a futa Symmetra with some comically differently-sized desks now. The desks are $static_prop, in case you were wondering.

With that rabbit-hole out of the way, I am hoping to start making actual forward progress on it again. Though now that audio is coming in and I am getting back into full production on Overbreed, I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to dedicate to this tool. We'll see how things fall out.

The last thing I want to briefly touch on for this section is, now that the final structure of the Micro Videos has settled down (into the Chapters system, as seen with Love and Degeneracy), I think it will be possible to salvage the story that Innie had written for the second part of her Batgirl / Catwoman project.

She and I talked about it a fair bit, and while there is still a lot to figure out, I am feeling optimistic. So much so, I elected to put together a Batgirl outfit for Barbara. I was hoping to have an actual pose to share tonight, but alas, the clock did not agree with me.

I am quite happy with how this came out, though. It's a kitbash of two different Gotham Knights outfits, with some retexturing to unify it all. Both Innie and I quite happy with the result. I am hoping to get that pose done sometime over the next few days. Keep an eye on my Bluesky for that eventual post.

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