Early November Updates. Tentacle Animation Underway! (Pixiv Fanbox)

I've been working obsessively on this project the last week and I've got some interesting things to share. For now I'll just cover the major work I've done on Sarah.

First, the hair. The animation starts with a closeup and the first thing I always notice are the artifacts in her hair. Not anymore!

I've redone her hair to remove that signature Source Engine crust. I'd never even *considered* fixing this until recently, but I was already knee-deep in edits for her model and figured I'd just clean the whole damn place while I was in there. The technique I'm using is really weird, but it worked beautifully. I'm probably 95% done tweaking it.

Next, I've added wrinkle-maps to Sarah's face. Basically, almost every single facial movement now changes her skin slightly.

It was a considerable effort generating artwork for the "stretched" and "compressed" states of her face. Unfortunately, they need a lot more work. Still, I'm happy just to be at this stage—it was looking impossible for a while.

Wanting to make these changes to Sarah's model was blocking progress on the animation. Now that she's in a state where the structural features are added and only texture changes are in store, I can resume animating. Now I just have to figure out how the heck to get the new model to read the old animation cues…

Finally, there's been some progress on the deveopment of my custom character. I've finished drafting a reference:

~Ammy the Succubus. HighWare gave me permission to post this.~

Also comes in nude. The goal is to make sure this doesn't look like "somebody's shitty OC" at the end of the day. I'm going back and forth about her proportions (shortstack or no?) and the desired level of realism to aim for. It'd be easier to make her toon-y like Gwen Tennyson, but I'm thinking I'll aim for a slightly more realistic look.

That said, I have no idea when or if this will reach completion. There are tons of dependencies between this reference and a usable 3d model, so don't hold your breath. This is just a side-project on a very long schedule.