Hello, everyone!

Look, I actually remembered to make the Tuesday Progress Report... on Tuesday! It's a Christmas miracle!

You may have noticed that this week's preview image is a bit different than usual, and that is because it is an excerpt of the intro sequence I put together for the To Breed and Bond series chapter, which is the next installment to be produced. It's only 17 seconds, but I can't overstate just how proud of it I am.

It absolutely agonizes me to not share it with the general public, BUT I will definitely be sharing it with you all in today's Progress Report. So let's just get right to said Progress Report, shall we?

Right up top, Overbreed has made a bit more progress. Less than I'd like, but it's progress nevertheless. As of right now, I have half of Narrative A's first project file fully lip-synced, translating to just under 2 minutes of lip-syncing, with Narrative A totaling around 7 minutes total.

I'd like to at the very least get the first project file fully lip-synced this week, with the second project file (and as such all of Narrative A) as a stretch goal. It isn't my highest priority this week, however.

No new audio has come in yet on Cinder's end, but progress is still underway on that. She is working on the next dub sequence, and we're tentatively eyeballing it coming in by end-of-day on Friday.

In regards to Milly's audio for Mercy, I intend to reach out to her later this week and see where things are. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, she had an unexpected death in her family, and so she's been under even more stress than usual lately - and that woman already is a tightly-wound spring to begin with. I am hoping that everything is going as well as it can be for her in this situation, and if nothing else, maybe the audio work can serve as a distraction for her.

I've put together a little 20-second preview of the first time we see Mercy and Sombra on-screen together, to show the amazing performances that Cinder and Milly both give. You can click here to give it a watch.

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In regards to the Micro Series, I mentioned last week how I was in the process of cutting special dub cuts for A Short Love Story. That ended up taking a lot longer than I expected it to, with me basically completely reconstructing entire sequences that will be entirely off-screen based off existing animation. At one point, the timeline looked like it had been sent through a paper shredder. All for the purpose of providing the voice actors clear direction of what their characters are doing off-screen.

When all the dust had settled, it wasn't until Friday evening when I had finally sent everything out to Mimi, for her Honoka dub.

Oh, I forgot to mention: all that work was just for Honoka. I haven't even started doing the Marie cut yet. Candy noted that she won't be available to record until the first week of June at earliest, and I am taking full advantage of that. And then Innie is still in the process of moving house (I told her that moving always takes longer than you expect it to, but she didn't believe me), though she has the movers scheduled to help her move the last of her furniture on Friday. Luckily, Helena doesn't need nearly as much content prep work as Marie and Honoka do, so getting her material together won't be quite a chore.

But yeah, Mimi is now officially in the process of getting the Honoka material recorded. In total, it's 12.5 minutes of dub audio to be recorded. Much like with Love and Degeneracy, I am having all of the audio recorded for the whole chapter, to maximize the recording time. It's a big up-front investment, and it requires a lot of lead time to get done, but that's why I am getting the recording started a full production early.

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With that out of the way, it's time to move on to To Breed And Bond, and the story I led with at the top of this post.

As I mentioned earlier, I ended up putting together a 17-second series intro sequence for the project. It wasn't originally meant to be 17 seconds--I intended for it to be about 45 seconds in length--but the 17-second mark presented a pitch-perfect stopping point for it, and coincides with how long the Love and Degeneracy series intro is, also clocking in at 17 seconds. For episodes that are about 2 minutes in length, I think a 17-second intro for the series is fitting. Especially when that intro only plays once at the beginning of the chapter.

My friend and I had recently started watching Arcane (yes, I know, fashionably late as always), and the series is such a stylistic powerhouse. The introductory animation particularly vibed with me (and also explained why Imagine Dragons' "Enemy" became a meme song; I had no idea till I watched Arcane that they used it for their intro), and it motivated me to explore building something stylized.

Then I had the terrible, terrible idea of making it a little music video sequence, again like Arcane's intro (though no Imagine Dragons this time). Which led to this bleet being made.

I thusly spent the bulk of the weekend hyperfixating on putting together this intro series. And I have to say, I am extremely satisfied with the final result. Honestly, in my opinion, it goes far harder than it has any right to. It arguably goes too hard, not only for To Breed and Bond specifically, but just in general. There is simply no way I will ever be able to top it. I'm putting A Short Love Story on the back foot here, because there is simply no way its series intro will be able to compete with this absolute fucking banger.

As such, I am extremely proud to share with you all what the To Breed And Bond series intro will be. This is a slightly outdated 720p render, but everything sans image quality is unchanged in the final version.

Click here to watch it.

Do be aware it is rather loud. And, of course, do be aware that it WILL subject you to my taste in music. You have been warned.

It is uncharacteristically flashy and stylish for what I normally do here, but I have made no secret of the fact that my entire original motivation for getting into animation was the fact I wanted to make music videos. Every now and then, I indulge that part of me, as a treat. I don't need to remind you all of the Life is Strange / Linkin Park music video, do I? I didn't think so.

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Wrapping things up with a few other quick mentions, I noted last week how I wanted to spend time this week working on the SFM Blender pipe. As you may be able to surmise given how the rest of this post has gone, I haven't had that much time to work on it since last week's Progress Report.

But, I have made progress on it regardless. As of last week's Progress Report, there were only two major systems that I had left to implement into the pipe: object-bone locks, and object-handle locks.

I managed to get object-bone locks done rather simply. I didn't anticipate them causing complications, and the high-level plan I had for how to do them worked pretty much without a hitch.

That left object-handle locks. These are a bit more complex than object-handle locks, because handles are virtual bones that SFM creates, for abstracting out and simplifying animation. The crux of the issue was figuring out how to find the underlying bone that a handle is driving, and then using that as the basis for the export.

After a bit of tinkering with the logic, I managed to get it properly resolving the bones from the handles, and exporting the animation out correctly. Getting it to import correctly into Blender, though, has been... an entirely different matter.

After a lot of tinkering, I found a mix of transformations that get the glasses imported correctly - though these transformations are very much magic numbers, and are very clearly not the correct solution. And they, uhh, import Elizabeth sideways.

I still need to figure out the correct way to import these glasses, but at this point I had spent over an hour constantly deleting and reimporting the same animation over and over again, making tweaks to the transforms each time, trying to figure out how to get it correctly.

It also occurs to me just now, while writing, that this might not even be an endemic issue, but an issue with the glasses model specifically. Because at the core of it, the object-handle locks are being treated the same as the object-bone locks, and the DVa/Energy drink animation imported perfectly fine.

So I need to do further experimentation. Try a sequence of DVa holding a pair of glasses (locked to her hand bone), and a sequence of DVa with an energy drink on her head (locked to her head handle). See if it is the model (glasses would import incorrectly when being held, if so) or if it's the lock (energy drink would import incorrectly when on DVa's head, if so). And then, whichever the case ends up being, figuring out why it's happening - and how to fix it.

On the subject of experimenting and fixing, I also came across a catastrophic error in REDxEYE's SourceIO tool while testing this Elizabeth "um actually" animation. It doesn't occur during standard imports with the tool, but when importing with flex drivers (which I use for proper left/right flexes for the face), Elizabeth's student outfit would catastrophically crash the importer.

With a bit of poking and prodding, I found and fixed the solution. Eschewing a lot of details, REDxEYE generates in-memory Python scripts to create the flex drivers, defining a separate function for each flex. The problem was a simple typo - when defining the variables within the functions, he would replace dashes with underscores. But when returning the variable, he wouldn't replace them. And so you have functions returning "nails-long", when the variable name is "nails_long". Thus causing the errors.

Fixing the issue really was as simple as just making sure the return also had dashes replaced with underscores.

I am currently figuring out the best way to get the error (and the fix) sent along to him, so he can push it into the official release of the tool.

Once I manage to get the object-handle importing working correctly (whatever the cause of the problem may be), I think that will be the last thing I need before I can finally use the SFM Blender Pipeline to accomplish my original goal - render out a pose of Victoria standing in front of a mirror.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the Pipeline will be entirely complete. For example, it doesn't even attempt to handle things like cameras or lighting right now. Nor does it have any notion of individual shots - something I'm not sure Blender even has an analogue for. And it importantly doesn't carry over IK rigs as they're applied in SFM, instead just importing the raw resultant animation.

But for my purposes, it is a hugely important stepping stone. It allows me to use Source Filmmaker as an asset manager, to quickly assemble scenes which can then be imported over to Blender to take advantage of its raytraced lighting. And a lot of the work that I needed to do for the Pipeline can and will be extracted out into individual tools, namely the Outfit Loader and the bodygroups system.

At any rate, I think that sums up this week's Progress Report.

As a final reminder, the last episode of Love and Degeneracy will be going public this upcoming Friday, May 29th. And a full film cut of the series will be going up onto the Films page sometime over the days after. The film release won't have early access (doesn't really make sense to have it), but it will have an exclusive 2160p option available for Patreon viewers.

Don't expect any special exclusive cuts or an extended release or anything from the film release. It will just be the series intro and the episodes all cut together into a single video, for convenient viewing.

On that note, that's all for now! Until next week, everyone!