[Tier 3] Karlach x Lae'zel Project Breakdown (Patreon)

This project (animation 7) was another big project that took me a while to complete. Most of that time however was me using cycles again. After rendering thousands of frames for animation 6, and each one taking minutes to render, I told myself that I did not want to use cycles again. Then I suddenly find myself using cycles again for this project... The map for this animation was relatively detailed, and Nyl's models are somewhat heavy on performance, so each frame took anywhere from 2:45 to over 3 minutes to render. Other than that, the biggest issue I had was with the fluid painter addon and motion blur.How it started:This project was a commission, which made it pretty exciting to work with a client and have them guide most of the creative process. Because this type of animation was something I have never done before, the client was essentially gambling on whether or not I could pull it off, and I really appreciate that. Because of this, I animated the main docking scene first and then worked backwards to make that scene the main focus of this animation. The first actual thing I did was setting up the characters and rigging them with jiggle physics:

Here are a few gifs from the first few animation tests that I did:

Animation: The animation for this project was honestly pretty fun, but it did have some challenging moments. Most of the jiggle was hand animated except for the breasts and the balls at certain times. This was done using cloth sim cage physics that I learned from previous animations such as the ball physics from animation 6 (Mizora x Shadowheart). And the way I would switch between hand animated physics and cloth physics would be to bake the whole animation with cloth physics, then keyframe the surface deform modifier strength on the character's mesh. So, it would be off when I needed it to be off. This was also my first time having any sort of actual clothing in my project. Both Karlach and Lae'zel were originally supposed to have clothing on during the intro scene, but everyone loves a good breast jiggle, so I decided to keep Lae'zel fully naked. Karlach's top was also not perfectly weighted so it didn't always follow her movement perfectly. Because of this I had to sculpt and keyframe a few shape keys so it would match her movement better.

The hardest thing to animate throughout the whole project was definitely the insertion scene. That scene is very important to an animation like this, and what made it so difficult was that it was 2 different things, applying force to one another, resulting in a reaction, with accurate jiggle left over. It didn't turn out quite as good as I wanted it to, but it definitely still worked. I had to reanimate this sequence 3 times.

The Map:After the first and main scene was animated, I made the whole map. This part of the project is always the least fun, until the map is finally done and it looks way better than it did! But starting on it is always hard and I usually procrastinate making the map. The client originally wanted the Baldur's Gate 3 camp & tents to be the setting, but they didn't care too much so I suggested the room of a tavern because I was not sure at all if I could pull off an outdoor setting with complicated tent geometry lol. This made things a lot easier for me and also made it easy to add decorations to the interior. A lot of the furniture and all the textures were from Blenderkit. Some of the models were edited, but stuff like the actual room, wardrobe, and candles were all modeled by me. I also added the vines using blenders built in vine generator addon but I think those were very heavy on performance.

Some things like the green chair and lockbox at the end of the bed were just never visible in the animation.

My scenes are pretty much always unoptimized and messy, but they get the job done visually to the best of my effort.

My biggest problem:Of course, this is not a 3D project without the issues that arise. And for this project, I was sadly unable to fix the main problem... This was my first time using the fluid painter addon. Which is an amazing addon that allows me to paint liquids onto a mesh then have it perfectly follow the mesh. This was used throughout the whole project pretty much. However, because the liquid mesh was constantly updating to follow the character mesh via surface deform, it would have to recalculate where it was frame by frame, and with motion blur, it just kind of made it look glitchy. You can really see what I am talking about during the pullout scene, when the liquids are flashing. It actually looked worse in the final render, so I had to go through it frame by frame and re-render certain frames after converting the liquid to a static mesh so it wouldn't have the blurry/glitchy artifacts. Like this:

I now know that a simple fix would be to paint the liquids on, convert it to a mesh, then make that mesh follow the character via bone or object constraint child of. I also saw online that I could change a setting on the liquid with the normals or something, but I have not tried that. Audio: The audio on this project was also kind of interesting because everything needed to sound really sloppy and wet, and unfortunately, a lot of the wet sounds in the OpenNSFW sound pack sound scratchy or rough which I don't like. I had to really search to find all the smooth 'liquidy' sounds. The VA also did an amazing job, but I probably should have commissioned 2 different ones just because both Lae'zel and Karlach sound somewhat similar at certain points, but that's not a big issue or anything.

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 time that I worked on this.