[Tier 3] Spa Day Project Breakdown (Patreon)

This project took me a long time to complete because I ran into a lot of problems, but I also learned a lot. This project breakdown is going to be structured into segments where I go into depth about my animation process and how I was able to make this. Remember, I am still new to blender so this is just my own personal process, and some things might be totally wrong or stupid.

Jiggle Physics

Jiggle physics has been a pretty big topic throughout my previous Patreon posts. When I first learned how to do it, it was messy and terribly done. It worked I guess for my first animation, but behind the scenes it was just a pain. I started this animation (spa day) by rigging both characters Illari and Ashe with cage meshes around the body parts that would be jiggling. Before finding a solution, I was copying and pasting the character mesh for that specific body part. This would work for some, such as the butt, however, it would not work for the breasts because of the nipples. If you just duplicate the whole breast mesh area with the nipples, it will create a lot of problems because it will also give the nipples physics. This does not work. My next method was to delete the nipple verts and rebuild the cage mesh manually, this also did not work because the mesh would be deformed due to bad topology. I eventually solved this whole thing by using the Q remeshify addon. This way I could just duplicate the specific part of the character I needed, remesh it into clean quads, then parent it to the armature, do a quick vertex data transfer, give it physics and bam, it works better than ever.

Building the Scene

I really care about delivering a story and as much quality as I can, however, due to the fact that I am relatively still a beginner, I have to balance story with my limitations. That is why I chose to do this animation at a sauna, they can already be naked, and I wouldn't have to do any crazy outfit rigging or something else I don't know how to do yet... So I came up with the simple story of Ashe by herself in the sauna, then Illari walks in on her.

Building it was pretty simple; each plank had the bevel modifier but only with 1 step so it would give me that desired gap without heavily affecting performance. The bench planks had automatic smooth shading so they would look flat while the wall planks just had smooth shading so they would look a little bit rounder and softer. The only things I did not make was the ceiling texture because I was lazy, and the condensation shader that I used over the skin of the characters. Both were found online, royalty free with no copyright on blender kit. The hallway was also easily done; I made a simple shelf just for a little bit of detail and depth, and I also repurposed the ceiling texture from my first animation onto the wall behind Illari to give it a wall-like texture.

Lighting

I personally really like how the lighting turned out for this project. I really tried to make the characters pop by giving them depth using rim lights and subtle shines on the edges of their skin. Here is a quick example of what I mean:

Looking at it now... maybe it looked better before but hey I am trying something new 😅idk I can't really tell lol.Anyways, I also added the sunlight through the window to give the audience more information on the setting, it lets them know that it's daytime, the sun is shining, and there is a window in the sauna. More depth and more story from such a simple thing, which I just love! I achieved this by shining a massive "spot" light through a cut out plane.

Also, the little ceiling lights were very simple because I didn't have to give them any detail or even a material. Them already being fully white makes them seem like a bright, working ceiling light.

The Problems

Apart from the Jiggle Physics and constantly having to rebake and tweak things over the course of this project. Two problems I ran into that I had to fix was a rendering issue and a shadow issue. These embarrassingly took me like 2-3 days to fix. When I did my first test render, something was not right because my whole PC was lagging and rendering one frame took minutes (it usually takes around 30 seconds in eevee) at the time I did not know the exact cause. Troubleshooting this took a while because I would remove something, render, then I would have to wait to see if it would take a long time. In the end I figured out my pc doesn't have enough vram for 4k image textures. So, I went through each image texture individually and downsized them all to 2k. I don't know why I didn't have this problem on my second animation but now I know. My next problem was after I rendered the first scene, I noticed that the shadows that Ashe was casting were flickering and glitching. I also had no idea what was causing this, but after a lot of troubleshooting and painfully waiting through test renders. I found out that it was my fault because I changed the mapping coordinates for the condensation material on her skin. I reset it, then stared at my screen after spending hours just to end up fixing it with a few clicks. I had a few other smaller problems, but none really worth mentioning.

Animation

The animation for this project was pretty straightforward; I knew the poses I wanted to do and the story I wanted to tell. The one thing I did severely wrong was animate each suck in scene 2 differently. I don't know why exactly I did this, but I did. The method with animating 3D NSFW stuff is to make a loop, copy and paste said loop, then go in and create differences in each loop. I for some reason said f*ck that and did each up and down motion differently. I mean, it made it look pretty good, but wow did it take a while. I had to go in and animate each part of Illari's mouth over and over across a few hundred frames, matching up locations and making sure everything looked good. Was it worth it? Probably not... Will I do it again? Probably not, but maybe if duty demands.

Liquids and Slime

I tried to do liquids and cream for my second animation, it failed, so I tried it again here and I think it worked. Before I yap away about the liquid cum simulation I did, the liquid strands attached to Illari and Ashe was a pretty simple setup:

I made it a while ago (for animation 2) so I forget exactly how I made them, but I followed a cum tutorial posted by @Rigid3d on twitter where he explained how to make the strands using besier curves, solidify modifier, then expanding the end faces to give it that 'sticking to the surface' look:

I made it stick by assigning the end verts to an empty, then giving those empty's a "child of" constraint to the characters mesh and that areas vertex group. I should have made my own vertex group so it wouldn't slide around as much but it still looks fine. The material used was a simple glass shader that works in eevee.Now onto the cream simulation. I was actually kind of surprised with how decent this turned out considering the setup I had, and it basically being my second attempt. At first, I tried to hand animate and keyframe different flows and velocities of the liquid for different inflow objects. But before I could spend the entire rest of my life doing this for it to probably not work, I made a simple solution. I let gravity and physics do the work for me. I basically made a funnel object, put the inflow object at the top, made a simple cage mesh around Ashe's balls so the fluid would have something to collide with while also saving performance.

Then I just keyframed where I wanted the inflow to actually flow, changed the liquid viscosity a tiny bit to make it thick, and that was kind of it. Then I baked it at a resolution of 250 which of course took a very long time, exported it as an abc, then imported it and gave it a mixed shader between a light cream color and the eevee glass shader so it would be a little bit transparent/milky. I think the inflow was a bit too big because there is a lot of juices flowing, but whatever, more = better sometimes and I do not want to bake another high-resolution fluid sim lol. Also, maybe there is a setting I could turn on so this pooling at the bottom wont happen. I am guessing this took a lot of resources and made the bake take so long. I will look into this for the future.

Or maybe I should have included that in the animation, maybe I don't know lol, it's a lot.

Postproduction

editing the audio wasn't that bad this time. I think the only parts that took me a while was figuring out the sucking sounds and of course matching the voice packs with the actual video. The Open NSFW audio pack is actually amazing and is also very well organized so I can just test audios and see what works where. I can't wait for the next project because I am going to try and hire a voice actress to do all the vocal audio. Again, this would just take the quality to another level and make things easier for me in the postproduction process. My renders were also kind of dark and unsaturated so in premiere I gave them a little bit more color and of course a vignette to make things pop in the center.

Overall, that is kind of everything I can remember about making this project, obviously there are a lot of small details not included in here like the number of times I changed certain materials, or tweaked things here and there, or had to re-render scenes, etc. So, if you have any questions or suggestions, you can always let me know.

Now onto the next animation...