Hello, everyone!

I apologize for this being week's Progress Report being a day late. I was surreptitiously wrapped into returning to Valheim with friends last night, after years of not playing it, and holy crap did we forget how easy it is to lose time in that game. By the time we finished I basically had to immediately fuck off to bed.

There's been no update on Overbreed this past week - Cinder is hoping to get the next batch of audio in sometime later this week, and I still need to reach out to Milly and see how she's faring, in relation to the sudden death in her family that derailed everything a few weeks ago.

Beyond that, let's talk about To Breed and Bond, A Short Love Story, and a few other odds and ends.

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As you all may recall, I had spent the past 2 weeks in a space between projects, focusing largely on large-scale technical projects. More about those later, but a consequence of that is that, May 29 (last Friday) was the official start of production on To Breed and Bond Chapter 1.

Over the weekend, I rushed to put together the bullshots required for the trailer of the episode, which will be publicly released on June 12, alongside the Early-Access release of Episode 1, and the WIP cut of the entire Chapter.

I decided to do the trailer first, because once it's out to the public, it's pretty much calcified. The Early Access release, by comparison, I can technically get away with making tweaks to it after the release to fix things, since it has such a limited audience. I don't like to do that, but I also try to be pragmatic about things:

If I had to choose between a polished Early Access release seen by at most 250 people and an unfinished trailer seen by thousands of people; or an unfinished Early Access release seen by at most 250 people and a polished trailer seen by thousands of people; I'd rather choose the polished trailer seen by thousands of people.

As of Monday June 1 (more about that day later), I had gotten all of the shots for the trailer pretty much where I want them, with finalized animation (core, lip-sync, gesticulation, expression, and detail), scenebuilding, lighting, and camera choreography. All that's left is a proper high-quality 4k render.

I ended up spending literally all day yesterday rendering out the final 4k versions of the intro sequence, after spending some time adjusting the blur and framerate of the background laser elements to be less harsh on the eyes. Like, I was still rendering while playing Valheim with friends. It finished not 20 minutes before I went to bed.

And so with that, I present to you, the more-or-less final cut of the To Breed and Bond Chapter 1 trailer.

Click here to watch the semifinal cut of the trailer.

Three quick notes before you watch: First, the audio is not finished yet, this is just a raw cut of the dialogue audio. Second, I haven't figured out a title for the chapter, so that will probably be added to the opening shot of the final trailer. And third, while the intro sequence is rendered in high-quality 4k (downsized to 720p for this trailer), the actual footage is currently rendered as low-quality 720p. So if it looks a bit grainy and splotchy, that's why.

With the trailer otherwise done, I am now shifting gears to focusing on getting the first episode ready for its Early Access release. I am hoping to have it ready for a final 4k render by end-of-day this Sunday, June 7. We'll see what comes of that. We are still slated for a June 12 release of Episode 1.

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In regards to A Short Love Story, Mimi has gotten all of her Honoka audio in, and oh my gosh she is such a perfect cast, it is uncanny. I will be honest with you all, casting Mimi was largely just a vibes decision on my end. I absolutely loved Mimi's performance as Elsa and Anna in Peasantsday, and I've been long trying to find another project to better put her amazing acting ability to good use than that slog of a project. I figured, on a whim, that if Mimi can so flawlessly radiate Anna's whimsy, then she would probably make a good Honoka. There wasn't any auditioning or even looking to see if she'd voiced Honoka or similar characters in the past.

I literally just pulled the trigger on a feeling of "Mimi did a good Anna and I want to work with her, I'm sure it'll be fine."

And holy crap did I set my expectations too low. Her performance isn't just "fine." She is an absolutely phenomenal Honoka, and I think you all are going to absolutely love her performance in A Short Love Story.

A major reason why there haven't been any animation progress on Overbreed over the past week is that, since production on To Breed and Bond began, I've been using the time I normally reserve for Overbreed work to instead work on processing Mimi's dub, so that I can get her feedback on everything.

My initial optimism of how long it'd take for me to process Mimi's audio has so far been... overstated. What I hoped to be a "quick" processing has turned into "one episode a day." Which is fine, I just have to adjust my expectations appropriately. Mimi provided a lot of audio for every given episode, as evidenced by the sheer number of tracks in this screenshot of Episode 3.

In that way, it's rather prescient that neither Cinder nor Milly has gotten any new Overbreed audio in, since I would have to otherwise process that as well. It gives me at least a few more days where I can focus on getting this all processed.

I also need to put together a Marie cut and send it out to Candy, now that she is back and able to record. That will be my post-Series effort today.

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And then finally, let's briefly talk about the other endeavors I explored over the week.

Right up top, as I am sure you all saw, June 1 saw the release of the filmic cut of Love & Degeneracy. It felt like a really nice way to endcap the chapter's run, compiling it all into a single video and releasing it on the Films page. I think all Chapters will have a similar endcap.

After all, the Chapters began after someone once asked me "why don't you just release the video in parts," in relation to Overbreed Episode 1 being 70 minutes long. My answer then (and still now) is because it wasn't written to be released in parts. Series, however, are written to be released in parts.

And I think it's only fitting that they also get put back together into a full film. From film, to parts, back to film. There's a poetry there. It rhymes.

Beyond that, of course, my primary venture over those 2 weeks of intermission has been the SFM Blender Pipeline. And I managed to make significant progress on it over those last few days, between last Tuesday's Progress Report and when To Breed and Bond production started on Friday.

On that Friday, I posted an entirely unscripted live demonstration of using the tool to build an animation, ex nihilo, in Source Filmmaker, and then import it into Blender. While it isn't feature complete yet, what is there is fully* functioning. And entirely automated. Just click a button, sit back, and let it do all the work.

I am extremely pleased with where I got the tool. And while it's not quite usable yet (it currently has one fatal flaw, in that it can't export out scenes that were loaded from a previous SFM session - they have to be freshly made and exported entirely in one session**), I am absolutely satisfied letting it sit where it is for a few months, until To Breed and Bond is finished and I get another two-week period to return to it.

* A single prop, the condom box, spawned in sideways. I need to figure out why. But everything else, all untested except for the floor, worked perfectly.

** I have a solution planned for this, I just haven't implemented it yet. The issue is that it requires the default pose state of models to work correctly. Blender uses rotations as deviations from the default pose state, rather than rotations as deviations from their parent bone - really annoying, wish it didn't, but it is what it is. And as anyone whose tried to use the Default slider in SFM can tell you, the default pose state of models doesn't save across SFM sessions. So I have to effectively spawn in fresh copies of every model being exported, grab their default pose states for the exporter, then delete those fresh copies. I have the code to do it, it's just a fucking mess and I've been more focused on getting the tool working right now.

And then finally, the Sunday streams have began working on a new tool for SFM, which allows for binding specific flexes to bodygroups. In practice, this will allow for "fitting flexes" to be automatically triggered when their relevant bodygroups are applied. The demonstration example we've been using is a flex to tuck Juno's jacket sleeves into her arm thrusters.

We made good progress on the foundations, but the conditional logic is currently too simple and needs to be evolved.

As I detailed in the Bluesky thread about it, there are three distinct advantages that such a flex-bodygroup binding would provide: one for all users, one for model creators, and one for large-project animators like myself.

Very briefly: it is convenient for users, not needing to manually juggle fitting flexes and various near-duplicate bodygroups and making sure everything is set correctly; it is convenient for model creators, not needing to create and manage so many near-duplicate bodygroups, since they can use flexes to shift between said near-duplicates.

And it is convenient for large-project animators because Source Filmmaker becomes unstable when models have large sum-polycounts, where things like flexes begin to misbehave and audio will crash SFM - having less near-duplicate bodygroups means lower sum-polycounts, meaning avoiding that instability.

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So yeah. That's where we are. Things are cruising right along. I am super excited for the release cycle of To Breed and Bond, and frankly even more excited for A Short Love Story after. I hope you all are, too.

Until next week, everyone!