[Tier 3] Mizora's Magic Touch Project Breakdown (Patreon)

Animation 6 (Mizora's Magic Touch) was my biggest blender project yet. I think it took me basically 2 months to complete. Most of that time was spent animating the 6~ different scenes, and also the constant struggle with learning cycles and rendering probably over 5000 frames at around 2 minutes per frame. The last time I used cycles was for my first project ever (Widow and Mercy animation) and I wanted to try it again for this project for the quality lighting and liquid materials. For this project breakdown I am going to explain each of the scenes that I made because that is basically how I went through this project, just went scene by scene. Scene 1: Ever since I started animation and downloaded Nyl's Baldurs Gate model pack I wanted to do a project with Mizora because she is my favorite character from the game. Scene 1 was originally just going to be its own thing, like that was it, but of course I exploded the whole idea and ended up turning it into a full 3-minute animation. I also learned how to create physics for balls, so I included that a lot throughout this project, this was one of the first tests:

Animating this scene was really fun though, I created the loop then just animated the differences like Mizora and Shadowheart looking at each other and the small stroke differences etc. I also was finally able to use Rigid3D's amazing cum material because I was working in cycles! This was used in the first scene and the last. For this first scene I still didn't have an idea for what exactly the setting/map was going to look like so I made a placeholder background:

And all those tiny specs were me playing around with particles and adding background dust to make the environment feel more alive I guess, but I'm guessing no one even noticed it in the final product lol, especially on twitter cause the compression probably makes it invisible. However, that small test map was replaced with the actual map when I made it later on because I ended up re-rendering this first scene probably like 8 times lolThis is what it looked like in the end:

Creating Mizora's peen ring was also kind of simple because all I did was make a cylinder, turn it 90 degrees, got rid of the end faces, put a shrink-wrap modifier on it so it took the general shape of her 3rd leg, then a solidify modifier, then the classic subdivision surface and made a few edge loops to get the shape finalized. Then parented it to a new armature and made that armature bone follow one of Mizora's armature bones via child-of constraint. And to make it squeeze a little bit, I just shrunk it down and applied a displace modifier with a custom vertex group for where the ring was. I also used the sculpt tool a little bit because the shrink-wrap wasn't perfect.

Ok now for the lighting yap....Figuring out the lighting did take me a very long time. I have never really done 'professional' lighting before, so this was my first time learning about and using volumetrics and editing the world properties and also the first time I ever opened the compositing tab. To get the lighting for pretty much every scene, I used the default Blender sky texture in world color with sun disc enabled, then just edited a few settings like the suns angle and size so it cast through the windows and onto the characters. And throughout all this here are a lot of screenshots that essentially show the steps I took to getting to the final look:

Then the final one I finally got to (with postproduction color grading tho):

And this was my compositing node setup, first time ever doing compositing so.... yeah... but I think it worked pretty well? It's how I got the sun bloom and shines and little glare effects which were very visible in the second scene. If they weren't there then the sun would have literally just looked like a flat circle out the window.

The whole process of creating the map and perfecting the lighting took me a very very long time and obviously I am not including all the little boring details and the billion test renders that I did throughout this project.Scene 2:This scene was definitely the one that took me the longest to animate... Trying to fit something big in a mouth is pretty tricky and it took a lot of fixing loops and different parts of the animation. I first animated the sucking loop, then went back and decided it needed more so I animated the whole lick, and kiss, then suck looping up, suck looking down, then deepthroat. All while animating Shadowhearts body to fit what was going on and match up with Mizora's movements. I wish I made this scene messier by adding some liquid, but I just didn't have the skills yet. This scene is also what made me finally make the whole map and even some of the outdoor details that were just preset free to use mountains and flat tree images which worked perfectly!

This was just used for scene 2, the map evolved and got added to throughout each scene because different camera views showed different angles of the outdoors, so I had to add more detail out there, by the fifth scene it looked like this:

and the inside looked like this:

Also, another important thing, I updated my blender and used version 5.1 for this because I wanted to use the new transparent BSDF to get that really nice see through look on the curtains! Scene 3:Scene 3 also took me a while to animate but mostly just because it needed a lot of unique movements, this took a lot of following other bones and child-of constraints, but I think it turned out pretty good. To get the boobs to grow I used the built-in shape keys, but these don't work when there is a surface deform modifier creating the jiggle physics, so I had to turn that off and hand animate the jiggle for when they first grow:

Then for the sex scene I had a ton of ball physics setup, but it just wasn't working how I wanted it to so I just hand animated them. I also originally wanted this scene to be the ending where the plug shoots out when Shadowheart climaxes, but I didn't really know how to do that. So, I scrapped that idea and had Mizora push it back in instead, and that is why scene 4 is a thing.

Scene 4:I didn't know what the new ending was going to be, but I did have another idea for an animation project that was going to involve a classic cow costume and milking theme, so I kind of just used that idea for this project. I am also still very new to fluid sims so simplifying this ending really helped me. As simple as this fluid sim was, it still caused me a lot of pain, but it was amazing when it finally worked! and the pillory was made by me just putting together different beveled cubes and cylinders basically:

Overall, this project breakdown was pretty short because I didn't really do anything that new or crazy. But again, this project took me a very long time because I was constantly fixing and figuring out cycles rendering and lighting, I rendered over 5000 frames because some scenes I had to render over and over again. The volumes biased render setting saved me so much pain because even in the final product, this project had so much visual noise when rendering, and I just couldn't do more than 250 samples because every single frame was already taking over 2 minutes to render. So, turning on that setting helped a lot with reducing noise! And as always, if I explained something that didn't make sense, or if I forgot to explain something entirely, or if you want to know anything else, just leave a comment here or send me a DM and I will do my best to answer it! A lot can be forgotten throughout the 2 months that I worked on this.