2017 Review

Hello friends,

2017 is drawing to a close. I hope you are enjoying some rest and relaxation with loved ones. I certainly am. It's great and has been much needed. Before the year rolls over and we start another orbit, I'd like to take a moment to review the last 12 months both personally and non-professionally. Clearly at lot has happened. And it might help to just take a moment and reflect.

[Vexorum 2017]

In late [December 2016]: Walking, Glowing, and Growing Test Animations.

I'd been learning about rigs and slowly putting mine together for months. At this point, for the first time, the whole thing started working well enough to be able to create these tests. It would reveal many a problem with my setup. And so, many more weeks would go into trying to understand what's wrong and fixing it. Looking back, I can say that I find rigging actually quite fun. I just really do not like painting skin weights. If there's anything I've learned here, it's what good animation geometry looks like and why.

[January] Flight Test Animation #1

My wings are part dynamic simulation, part regular joint rig. The only reason I was able to do this at all is thanks to a good tutorial video that showed me exactly what I wanted to know. What I've learned here is how to run the simulation engines AND, most importantly, how NOT to run the simulation engines. These are giants of computational intensity that are best left asleep unless absolutely necessary. In a sense, I regret going with dynamics for my wing rig. It makes the whole thing much more complicated and I'm not convinced the result is worth it. On the other hand, I learned a lot and I love the topic of phy-sim-tech.

NSFW [January] Wish Granting

By this time I was plotting what would eventually become Awaken. So I found the lady model and I knew I'd have to give it a thorough test-run before I could commit to using it. The test went off without much trouble, and the animation was very well received by the community. I think this is where I decided to remove the dynamic rig for my male part and resort to a simple spline control. I learned that the upload constraints for videos on FA are too much trouble. Hence all my NSFW videos after this one are hosted on my own site.

NSFW [March] One Hundred

Because I reached 100 subscribers on FA. Also because I wanted to. Used this as an opportunity to see how hard it is to put images (like screenshots) on a screen in the video. Also I remember this was my first attempt at editing audio and video together.

[May] Awaken

Due to my situation at the beginning of the year, I have had the opportunity to spend nearly full time every day for several weeks on animating Awaken. In the end it, this project totalled 13 different scene files, and over 9000 frames. The intent of this project was originally just to test the rig's custom built grow controls. But because this is a theme I enjoy and I had already had the back story in my mind for months, it turned into my longest animation to date. Over a dozen updates to the rig resulted from this project. I've learned a lot about how to edit together audio. It was a fun challenge to get all the timing right and to design the ending sequence change-over to match the music change-over. I learned that I love this! And I absolutely want to do more story-driven animations in the future. Believe me, I have stories I want to tell.

[June] Run!, Flight Test Animation #2

I found that walking and running, while the cornerstone of character animations... are actually very difficult. I suppose I think Run! is my best animation to date. The quality of the movements just seems better to me. I can't say it's great... but, small steps. I learned I love using things like camera-shake and background objects to indicate motion and weight. I also learned I don't like road cones.

[July] Patreon

Though my patreon account had been set up for a while, it wasn't until this point where I promoted it more publicly. I wrote some text explaining how I'd use it, and I thought it'd be nice to read it out loud and animate some "lip-sync".... Can't really lip-sync without lips. But it was fun to do and informative anyway. I learned for example, that it takes A LONG TIME to sync even a sentence or two. This is why I crapped out after the first part of the text and only animates the ending bit. You may call me lazy. In my defence, I learned what I wanted to, and I spent that time doing something else.

[September] Anomalous Stellar Matter

I love space! I love planets and stars and everything! I'd been tinkering with a planet model I made. I set up a series of noise generators to drive the colors and textures of the planet dynamically. Once I realized I could animate this over time, the plan for this animation was hatched literally over night. And once I had the idea, I just had to make it. In this particular project I learned that transparency is a lot more difficult than you'd expect. I just thought it'd be a slider somewhere between 0% and 100% and that's that! But no, apparently, it takes post-processing. So the last half second of this animation took some special attention.

NSFW [October] Too Full + Teaser + Patreon Extra

I had created the initial frames of this animation somewhere in May and had discarded it. One Hundred got a lot of positive attention from the community. Many a person seemed eager to see more of a similar theme. I reviewed the discarded animation and decided to give it another shot. I learned to better check my lightning setup before going to render. Rookie mistake... I'm sorry. I had fun destroying the building and street lights!

Currently I'm working on Boxed, the animation with Acheroth's Andre. Animating two dragons takes a lot longer than one. Especially animating one with an unfamiliar rig. It's going quite well though. I've got the first 500 frames close to ready. If you're a patreon supporter of mine, expect a low-quality preview of the opening sequence, and perhaps a render or two. Soon!

[Personal]

For me, 2017 has been an unusually painful year. Sure, it started off with a surgery that I probably will never fully recover from. (Don't worry, I'm not in pain or in danger or anything like that!) But in general this year seemed to have more injury and suffering than I recall for other years. Still it's been an overwhelmingly positive year! My finances are OK. My home situation has improved significantly. I've met many wonderful people on the net. And despite being often short on time, I must say, I've got a lot done. And that makes me happy.

If you're supporting me on patreon or via another means, a very heart-felt thank you from me to you.

Everyone else only gets a regular thank you! Haha!

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the eve and the fireworks.

Take care,

-Vexorum