Outline Experimentation on Julie's Animation

I swear to god, if it weren't for outlines, I would have completely finished LLRR already. This may be much ado about nothing to you, but here we go:

I recently revamped Julie's only LLRR animation, but I mentioned that I was frustrated with it. I realized after several days that I definitely was still not pleased with it, and after getting a chunk of other images done I felt better about pouring more time into it.

Here's what I made the other day:

Technically speaking, it's pretty clean, and I liked it.

But I'm not in the business of liking it, I'm in the business of LOVIN' IT.

So I tilted Flin to be angled more parallel to Julie's body, squishing her boobs down more, bringing their eyes closer together to play up the eye contact, etc. The goal is to make the scene look as hungry and intimate as possible, and I'll always take a messier result if I feel it has a stronger vibe. This is part of why revamping can be so frustrating; if the old version has a certain fire to it, recapturing that is a crapshoot.

ANYWAY.

I was struggling to get the "rippling" on the breasts to look right, but I was baffled at how good the preview looked to me while working on it. So, I tried rendering out a version with no outlines whatsoever, just to see:

And I just...really liked it. It's not perfect, but the eye contact is stronger, and the boobs look softer.

Still, the outlines provide definition. I started to wonder if I could faintly reintroduce the outlines basically everywhere except the boobs and surrounding area, to help keep it more within the bounds of my normal work.

So I worked some compositing magic, messed with the outline settings, and came up with this:

You can't really see the cleavage, but after looking at this shit way too fucking much, I've reached the conclusion that the cleavage is only worth seeing if I could figure out the supple rippling motion, and that's clearly not gonna happen for now. Instead, this is almost a band-aid solution but I legitimately really like it, even if it is a little different.

So this is what I'm going with for now. I'm much happier with this than with the last version, and I can only hope it's the same for you lol.

That's enough on this one for now! But I really might start dabbling more in removing or fading out outlines to help gloss over issues in work, if it still looks nice and gets me to move forward. I also may yet still revisit this to try to get a cleavage curve in there.