Jill WIP

It's been about 10 days since my last update, so before it goes too long without one, I'm making this post.

My "short" Jill animation is now around 30 seconds long. It shouldn't be a surprise that hiring a voice actress immediately added way more audio than initially planned. This is only about half the audio she sent too, so I still had to cut loads. It's not as crazy as you think though.

I've also decided to take it upon myself to finally learn the NLA editor. That's the Non-Linear Animation editor for Blender. Think of the NLA editor like a movie editor. You create an animation and turn it into a clip. You then put these clips together to make a movie. You can also layer animations on top of each other.

Okay then, learning something new in Blender on top of a longer animation, that's definitely crazy? Sort of.

The NLA editor is actually something I wanted to learn for a long time. I've known about it since Rigid mentioned it to me when I started animating in Blender, but I didn't want to add complexity on top of learning the basics. Most tutorials for the NLA editor were pretty poor too. 

I'll try to spare technical details and keep this short, but my workflow for animating is ridiculously slow and tedious. Copying out loops and also trying to vary their pacing was very difficult. It really started to hit when I was working on that longer Jill animation from last year. The other problem was trying to layer animations. That is, imagine animating head motion to react to a thrust in a loop, but then also having to animate the head looking around naturally without the loop. Honestly, the Claire animation I just did was still frustratingly tedious too despite being short. 

I decided to give the NLA editor another go. First evening went about as horribly as learning something new in Blender usually goes. I was mostly infuriated with the UI. Newer tutorials really helped things click though. I spent multiple days trying to figure out how to adapt my usual animation workflow to the NLA editor. Then, I started working on the loop. Results are promising.

This is what I have so far. Jill WIP 

That's... not much, is it? That's one loop of the handjob, broken down into one clip for the NLA editor. It would take literally seconds to copy this out for a 30 second animation. It would only take a few minutes to copy out the clip with different durations to vary the speed for more natural motion. Then, other animation could be layered on top.

It hasn't taken too much extra time to learn what I have so far, and I feel like it is already offset the time it would take to copy things out manually. It will only save time for future animations. 

Honestly, if I get the hang of the NLA editor, this will be a game changer.

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As for how that impacts my other plans, I'm not too disappointed if I don't do my other goals for April. I really want to finish the Morrigan model, and ambitiously wanted a loop to go with it. It might be difficult, but I think I can finish Jill this month. Morrigan's model might not make the cut. A Morrigan loop is certainly a May project now. All things considered, I still feel really good with what I've learned about the NLA editor because that's going to be really important.