Dev Log #26 | Animation Breakdown #3

It's time for the third and final installment of my Animation Breakdown series. Last time we focused on the actual animation, cleanup and the final compositing. Now it's time to look at the rendering, the sound design and the exporting of the animation as a final video for the game.

• Writing, that's what I always start with.
• References, This might be the most important step.
• Light, or else things would look ugly.
• Animating, the bread and butter I'd say.
• Cleanup, getting rid of small errors, fixing shaders, applying physics.
• Compositing, making sure that everything looks nice.
• Rendering, we need those images after all.
• Sound, it has to be all squishy and gooey or it's no fun.
• Exporting, we want a video at the end

7. Render settings.

Rendering is straight forward. After all the previous steps are done I just press render and it starts rendering. This takes time. With my current engine I'm usually rendering about 7-11 seconds per frame. Sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower depending on the scene. But in future projects of mine that'll probably change as I'll switch to a new render engine inside of Blender, but that isn't important right now.

One of the biggest concerns with the rendering is actually diskspace.  Every frame is saved as a separate image and every image needs space. The main image formats that are used would be jpeg, png, exr and webp. Exr is the best format with the most detail and it has some additional amazing properties. The problem is, the files are huge. They can go up to 100mb per frame! I'm not kidding. With the amount of frames I render I would literally need 20-30tb to store it all. That means exr is off the table. Webp is basically a modern fusion of jpeg and png, only better. I'd love to use it, but Blender doesn't support it as of right now. So it's of the table too. That leaves us with pngs and jpgs. Png is superior in image quality, but for most of my animations you can't tell the difference between png and jpg, especially because of the compression on the final videos. So to safe space and have faster rendertimes I render my animations as jpegs. But in the future that will most likely change. I'm planning to expand my storage and will hopefully be able to use exr's without having to worry about space.

8. Sound Design.

After the rendering is done I import the images as an animation into After effects and start adding the soundeffects. In my opinion, this is one of the most crucial parts for a good 18+ Animation. The squishes, squashes and sloshes. This is also a part in which I'm still very much a beginner, but I'm getting better. At least in my opinion. What I usually do is to layer a few different sounds beginning with a background noise. 

I know that the moaning and breathing will be added in the game, so I won't have to include it in the video. That means I want a general "Sex Ambiance" that fits the actions performed. To achieve that, I use a mix of several soundpacks I purchased of japanese websites with names I can't read, but they work. I process them in Adobe Audition to filter out any loud breaths or moans or all the other stuff that I will add by myself and need control over, until I have a quiet general ambiance of wet noises. Once I have that, I try to roughly match the louder sounds of this background to the more intense moments of the animation, so there is no obvious disconnect between the actions and the sounds.

Once that part is over, I start adding the impacts and sounds accompanying distinct motions. Like slapping when the hips meet, gagging sounds when deepthroating or louder squishes during penetration. These sounds are also from various soundpacks on the internet and till today I'm very unhappy with them. It's extremely difficult to find good 18+ soundeffects and I'll have to find a better solution in the future. Once all those sounds are applied, I move on to export the animation.

9. Exporting the final animation.

Exporting is straightforward. Ren'Py supports a few different video formats. Because videos can be rather large files, my main criteria is to use one that saves space and loads fast in Ren'py. The answer is Webm. It's extremely small and loads fast. So all my videos are exported as Webms. With it, the game is currently at around a size of 3GB. If I were to use something like MP4, the size for the game, because of the many animations in it, would easily reach 10-15gb if not much more. it would add unnessecary download times to the game and not much more quality than webm. It is a tradeoof though, and I'll reevaluate this decision in the future. I'm very happy with wemb though. Just like webp, webm is just a very modern, very good file format, made directly from the folks at google.

And that's it. That is, from start to finish, how I make my animations. Obviously there's still much more to it but the posts were already long enough. Maybe some other time when I've learned a bunch of new stuff I'll go into more detail, but for now that is it.

You'll hear again from me next Monday with new infos on the game. Until then, stay safe and have a good week!