Update 49: Expectations

Hello all.

Work has continued at a good pace this month, I'm glad to say the animation itself has been finalised now, I'm now at the stage of simulating all the jiggly and flowy bits that are involved in this scene, of which there are many.

The rubber inside this machine is a cloth simulation

My original expectation (hey, that's the name of the title!) of how long this would take me was -way- off. Mainly due to having to animate the mouth.

Mouths have been mentioned a few times in feedback from people, lots of people like the masks, but also like to see the expression possibilities of seeing the lips and mouth, I like those too, so I was definitely keen to include them in this production, I'd thought that having the model professionally rigged and supporting of face capture (and I had a shiny new face camera to play with) would make this part trivial, easy even, barely an inconvenience some may say.

An early piece of facial animation, it's not obvious what is wrong here without the audio, but trust me, it's clunky.

Well, it wasn't! As ever, there does not appear to be a substitute for cold hard amounts of time, and whereas I've definitely gotten better over the years, it's not like that means you can just sit down and instantly realise what needs to change, you animate, you watch back, you tweak, you watch again, you export a render which you watch on your phone whilst you're supposed to be relaxing or socialising, you watch it again and again and wonder why it doesn't look quite right.

Until, eventually it clicks and you make the adjustment that fixes the inexplicable 'ehh' feeling you were getting before, and you move onto the next sticking point.

The same segment after some polish and figuring out what needed to change

One, somewhat unintuitive approach that I found helped me when it came to final polish was watching the animation without the audio.

That was also nice because it meant I could listen to something other than the, admittedly addictive and engaging performance from the voice actress (in this case Juno is voiced by the lovely and incomparable SultryLamp) As lovely as it is, once you've heard it a thousand times you do start to crave some variety.

Overall if I had to guess, having the mouth in this scene added at least 2-3 weeks of animation time to this production, I think the result was worth it, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about slapping a mask on her halfway through though!

Same shot as the update last month, after a buttload of polish, mainly facial animation

However, that wasn't the point of the scene, which was, along with revisiting AIMEE in her home turf, an opportunity to sprinkle some more lore about how Cirimani and the world at large work.

We have been discussing how we might find a good middle ground that cuts down the animation demand a little, whilst providing glimpses of the mouth, perhaps a semi-transparent mask that can be installed mid procedure?

I've also considered that face capture may not be the -best- solution for the style of animation I've found myself adopting, capturing a live face performance is good and it's great for getting broad strokes down, but it doesn't really match the buttery, exaggerated expressions that we find ourselves liking on these stylised models, that may just be a case for additional polish time, or maybe just something to think on, I'm never done learning in this field it seems.

A new device we ended up using as a replacement for the old nipple sucker (which you can spot on her left nipple during my frantic panning around) this lead to the need to do some last minute re-modelling of the supporting arm too.

The entire production clocks in at about 13:10, I'd mentioned in my previous update it was longer than 10, at the time it was closer to 14:30, I've made some cuts since then for levity's sake, writing something down, then getting it voiced, then animating it and incorporating the visual medium always leads to a lot of cuts and changes, in this case I felt some sections dragged a little and needed cutting.

I was left with a decision on whether to cut the production in half, as I'd mentioned was part of my plan some few updates ago, and release the production in 2 halves, In the end I felt it would have harmed more than it would have helped, for a few key reasons.

An example of why some sims are necessary, this is a shot without a sim on the body fats, look at the butt and the thighs/calves

First of which is motivation, I've been at this long enough now that I'm used to the natural highs and lows of motivation through a production, the excitement at starting, the slog in the middle when you're just 'getting stuff done' the sparks of inspiration that keep me up till the wee hours of the morning, the last few weeks where it feels like I'm spending 27 hours a day at my computer.

But nothing really matches the feeling of having a start to end complete story, it means you can watch the entire thing through and view it as a complete production, there's definitely a sense of achievement to having everything laid out as it's intended to be viewed.

The shot with a body fat simulation, much better! totally worth the... 9 hours it took to crunch (boobs are yet to be done, looks like I need to do them on their own)

The second reason is simulations.

If you decide to cut things in half, and you need a simulation to stay consistent through the entire animation, what you're doing effectively is committing everything done up to the point where the cut is, What if I decided that something flows better or, perhaps want to polish some element of the animation?

That would then throw out the rest of the simulation that would be due to happen for the second half. Additionally when it came to releasing the second part, I'd have to re-run the entire sim from the start, as well as that taking literally ages, there does exist a risk of, due to the change in impetus between the parts, and the nature of simulations in general. It may result in a jarring transition between the two halves of the production as 2 not quite the same sims butt up against each other.

In short, it would cost a lot more time then It would save.

Some goofy sim behaviour I had when first iterating on the body fat sim, along with some healthy viewport failure.

The final reason was, it would have been a bit cruel on you guys! There is a break point in the animation where it would have made sense to make the cut, but I think with the additional turnaround, I really didn't want to end up cutting things up just for the sake of getting it out a few weeks earlier, I owe it to you guys to release a finished, polished story all in one go.

Another case for the simulations necessary, this doesn't have anything simulated on it, notice the rubber sections around the glans, the pad rubbing the frenulum and the base seal.

So, once again it seems I end up eating my words, what seems like it would be a good plan on the outset turns out to have been a little misinformed. That is simply the nature of the business, we can but learn from our mistakes and try and avoid them in the future.

Left on my todo list is a few more sims, then I'm lighting and hitting render on it, I usually light and complete the sims within a week.

The rubbers in this device had to be simulated, it was a delight to get those all functional though, definitely my favourite new device.

I don't know exactly how long it will take when it comes to the rendering stage as that always differs with each project, but the last one took about a week and this is a little longer, so I'm hoping that this one will be ready within the next 2-3 weeks. 

Where this animation would have ended, had I decided to cut it in half

More news as it comes, Caio for naiou!