Let's talk about WIPs! (Animation Project)

-TL;DR-
Jump to the next section that says TLDR if you don't care about reading my thoughts about releasing WIP stuff lately, and just want to know about the animation that will be released later today!

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When I first got onto Patreon, I was subscribed to a ton of creators of all kinds, and all of them approached their content regularly. Most of them would strive for a connection with their subscribers that gave them more cut content, more WIPs, more 'test' stuff that wasn't really ready for mass market showcasing. On the flip side, there were creators who only showcased fully produced, complete works, and only offered very polished WIPs and cut content. That meant that there was a lot less content, but much higher quality.

I've never been good at the latter, especially because of my substantial health problems and need for really good insurance, I cannot rely on this income alone, and have to work a full-time job on top of this (mostly) full time art work to make ends meet. I'm also still constantly trying to improve my processes, most notably in animation. For comics, I've mostly landed in a place where I'm happy with 99% of the work. I still have a long way to go with animation.

Because of all this, I give you all a lot of cut content and unused work. Part of that is because, well, what else am I going to do with it...? But also because if I don't share that stuff, it would be much, much longer between substantial releases, again, especially for animation. I don't want to be one of those transactional creators that only puts out work every few months, then disappears.

But I also like being transparent about this, and because it's been such a focus of mine in 2024 to get better animation tools and workflows, I've felt like I needed to really start putting my money where my mouth is. This year, I've invested over $2000 in animation tools alone, but I'm happy to say that it's all coming together. Finally.

Later today I'll be putting on what I hope will be the last unpolished/WIP/test animation project that hasn't fully moved into a new pipeline I've been working through. I've said that a million times by now, but that's just kind of the nature of the beast I've learned. Learn a new thing, integrate it into your work flow, get better at it, test, and move onto the next thing.

So this project has two pieces, and again, is a step forward from my last animation project 'My Life Married to a Micro'. I'm still using iClone, but now I've moved the render engine to Blender. However, before I moved into Blender for rendering, I was trying out a plug-in for iClone that uses Iray, the same render engine that Daz Studio uses (which is what I render comics in).

As an aside, I moved into Blender for several reasons - the Iray engine was easier to to use, but no longer supported by iClone, so I was going to have to change eventually. I was going to make that switch next year, but then my main rendering computer's power supply died last week (worst timing ever), and my secondary computer just can't handle rendering Iray as well, so I was kinda forced to switch earlier. By coincidence, iClone just happened to release a new direct integration with Blender, so it just made sense to move over now.

-TL;DR-

So what does all this mean for the project coming later today? It means there are effectively two parts. The first part is rendered in Blender (Cycles), and I'm still trying to learn how cameras work. Additionally, hair and cloth physics are a little weird sometimes (or just stop working) and the tiny dude's skin textures comes off too pale. There's some really cool shots though, but also some weird framing where the camera clipping distance is too close, causing black space at the bottom of the frame. Lastly, several shots look blurry/patchy because they didn't render log enough, and I used some heavy denoising to make them passable for now. Again, this is my first time rendering an animation in this way, this was a test project, and I'm already working on the next one. This is also a result of the lower-spec computer having to render this part as well. Bare with me!

Afterward, in the second part of the animation, these shots were either rendered in Iray, or just exported directly from iClone without ray-traced rendering. It looks much different, and even though the camera work is better overall, the actual texture work is pretty terrible haha.

The first part I will be releasing for $10 patrons and up (after early access for $25 patrons for a few days). The second part will only be for top tier patrons as cut content because the texture work is just terrible. I'll also release some clips of the first part on the $5 during the holiday week. The entire project is about 3 minutes long at the moment, but I still have some edits to do. The beginning is mostly unaware, feet (sandals), and near crush, with the second part being aware, gentle giantess, and some implied vore (not in food).

Overall, I'm extremely excited about what the future holds, and 2025 is going to be a great year for animation.

Cheers!

-U.E.