Bad Vibes Postmortem (Pixiv Fanbox)

Abstract

Bad Vibes was awesome. It was fun to build, challenging, and never once felt like a chore.

The Audio

Maybe the project's biggest success. Most of the commentary has centered on this aspect, at least.

One of the main reasons I started BV with Sherry was to dip into the pool of interesting voice lines I've been sitting on. RE2 has some incredible voice acting, but this is all stuff I can't use in a 10-20sec loop because you'll hear it repeat too often. I sprinkled them into the audio editor and arranged them into a story.

~ Same old workflow. Lack of camera changes made this a bit simpler than usual.

Sherry goes from nervous, to angry, to denial, to bargaining, to somewhere approaching acceptance. Fucking rad. I couldn't have done this in a loop. Imagine a world without Sherry telling you "You need help". Why even live?

I recorded impacts and vibrator sounds myself so they could match the action onscreen. It makes a huge difference over a generic vibrator sound applied over the whole thing.

Long Animations

I haven't done a full-length POV animation since Diner Mischief back in 2016. There are so many cool details I get to do in a long animation that aren't possible with loops. Actions have consequences and everything feels more weighty and real. Sherry becomes more sweaty and flushed as BV goes on, for example.

~ So many keyframes... if you look closely, you can actually see where she cums.

I love doing title drops in these... the "Bad Vibes" sharpie bit was actually a last-minute addition, but once I realized it could be done there was no stopping me.

There's just the problem of these animations taking so damn long to make. At 80.5 hours for posing, animation, audio and post-production, BV is actually among my most time-efficient builds considering its length. Be that as it may, that's still a huge amount of time to spend on one thing.

At the end of the day, I can't afford to do these too often. Time I'm spending working on a monolithic piece of smut is time I'm not spending putting content in front of people's faces. I have to grow my fanbase a lot before I can consider doing long animations full-time.

For most people coming in contact with BV, it will be a thumbnail that crosses their eyes as they scroll. They may click, they may not. They don't care if it's 3 seconds long or 1:50. Now, I care, but that's just artistic aspiration. It's even more important (for me) to get VLVT to the big leagues so I can quit my day job. So... toward that goal I will work.

Materials

I use this word here a lot, but that's just because it's so much of what I do. I'm getting faster at working with Source materials and models.

For this project, I wound up improving Sherry's skin, the hitachi, and the pillory. The simplicity of the scene made this process easy. Dragon Tamer, for example, had a more complex scenebuild with many things to work on.

~ Yep, it's wood.

Skin and Hitachi Materials (gif)

~ Sherry's skin has goosebumps, sweat, and flushing. The Hitachi I continued refining from its last iteration in TYDtWD Ep 3.

Old Hardware

It's becoming clear that I need to upgrade soon. Working at 1080p is taxing me more than I'd expected. Manageable render times are a thing of the past (just like my GPU). Every full render of BV took eight hours, and I wound up doing no less than ten at various stages. Even encoding the video took a hilariously long four hours.

With my current hardware, I can pose scenes just fine with full lighting. This is good for making posters, but as soon as I need to play back animation it becomes a choppy nightmare. This leads to me working with lights disabled most of the time, so I can accurately gauge movements at their native speed. In order to see what things look like with both motion and lights... I've gotta hit that render button. If I could play back my scene at full speed with all the lights on, I'd save TONS of time. I'm eyeballing the cost-efficient GTX 1650 SUPER right now.

~ The virgin "Unlit" versus the chad "Lights on"

Final Thoughts

When I decided to turn VLVT into a full-time animation gig, one of the things that seemed natural to me was to have hard delineations for everything. "Loops" vs "Short animations" vs "Long animations", etc. I thought for any project I'd define the goal from the start and work to fulfill that. I'm starting to realize that with animations, the project can wind up defining itself. Bad Vibes is proof of that—a material test, turned teaser, turned full animation. I kind of feel like I was just here for the ride.

I've had a couple days to rest and organize the mess of files generated by this project... and it's back to the races!