"Awakening I" reflections + future plans.

TLDR. Improving the models and making short animations. When done - second part.

TLDR.

Improving the models and making short animations. When done - second part.

Overview.

I want to share my thoughts on the first part of the "Awakening" series—what went right, what went wrong, and current plans moving forward.

Initially, it was supposed to be released on December 31st. Roughly 70% of the animation was ready around December 20th, and I felt confident that, at that pace, I could finish it within a week. But I significantly underestimated the time needed for the cumshot scene, unexpected reshoots/rerenders, and general video editing.

What exactly about the cumshot scene that took so much time?

Mainly, a lack of general Blender knowledge and no real experience with fluid or particle simulations. I thought you just add a particle sim to a cock, play with parameters a bit, and it’s mostly done.

)))

Nothing I tried produced good results, which stalled progress for nearly two weeks.

Eventually, I gave up on the deadline and took as much time as I needed to get it looking decent. After a few more weeks, I managed to get something that wasn't total garbage —minimal clipping and decent fluid behavior. Once that was done, the final animation shots were wrapped up.

Rough progression steps, leaving out most iterations
 
Then I did the ending shots and the whole animation part was basically done. Sure sure.

Fuckups.

• Animation flow.

  • During animation, I thought I had a clear vision for shots sequencing and transitions. During editing, I quickly realized it wasn't true at all. Some shots didn’t blend well, others dragged too long and killed pacing. I ended up aggressively cutting and rearranging. Some in-between shots had to be made from scratch, which took another week.
    Result - many clips trimmed or outright removed. At least the flow was fixed and it wasn't looking so goofy anymore.

• Audio.

  • Somehow I thought I would be able to do this in a couple of hours. I am not sure what was I thinking that time. Finding relevant clips took me more than couple of days, blending them together and putting on the timeline. Another 2-3 week wasted doing very little work every day. I think now I can do this in a week.

• Accidently deleted rendered source animation files before inspecting the mp4.

  • I still can't believe this, but I actually managed to erase them from the disc. I did lots of test video outputs and thought I set the correct parameters on the final output. Turns out I rendered it out in 8 bit instead of 10, resulting in massive banding in dark areas and overall worse quality. Long story short - no, you can't recover .exr files if they were not put into the bin, cause they loose their headers and can't be opened if you do recover them using 3rd party software. At least I still had an earlier test file that I used instead where needed.

  • Some banding
    
    

    
    
    

  • Final timeline. Red strips are the parts I lost.

    

These 3 I think are the most severe ones, I don't want to talk about many little ones.

Future plans.

The second part isn't coming out any time soon.

I need to prepare the models first, figure out VA's work and improve my animation. Right now it's not enough to pull what I wanted to in the next part.

I think I would be slowly improving the models, making short skits, showing off the progress and gather feedback. You just look at her skin and you know it's bad. At least not great.

Also, there was a shot where she's touching her boobs, and they are not reacting to touches. I couldn't set up the physics properly at the time, so i just leave them this way... At least this is fixed now.