Text update 13 Feb 2022 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, we have a bit of information for you this week. We’ll get started with James’ update first.

We’ve been focusing on finishing up the animation that I mentioned last update with Lisa and Cerene. We still had some clipping issues to deal with and the jiggle wasn’t quite right, but it’s all done now! We’ve even rendered out a second cam with a side view as mentioned. Otherwise, we have two more animations we’re hoping to get out this month. They’re both done in terms of animation but need the usual final touches (lighting, jiggle, camera) applied. We also have a bunch more in the works!

On the Blood Crown side of things, we’re still working on building the Bloodlust universe by giving some backstory to the characters, and fleshing out the roles in Blood Crown. We’ve also set up a “base rig” with a G8F model from Daz which we’ll be able to use for future A3D characters when we want to quickly transfer characters from Daz or Maya exports.

Beyond what James said here, I got an update on the latest news with the CyPunk animation. Miro said the work to fix this one was a bit involved, and took about a week to complete. He solved the lip syncing issue by remapping the animation to 24 FPS. This required him to fix a bunch of stuff (reworked a lot of the lip sync and animation changes, realigned the dick, and more). About a week ago they started rendering again with these new fixes in place, and so far they have a couple cams rendered. They’re just waiting now on the 3rd and last cam to render.

We also noticed many of you were asking for more specifics on what it means to be refocused on Bloodlust. Many of you will remember that we said the production was about 70% done in December 2020, and that to wrap up the remaining 30% miro would need to hunker down and finalize all the animations himself to get it release-ready. Miro did complete a bit of work on this in 2021, but as we disclosed in November 2021, he had difficulty juggling it against all our other projects, so the project only advanced slightly.

Last month we did have a few animations left to wrap up, but other than the CyPunk animation (explained above), they weren’t taking up too much of miro’s attention. The Seed of Rebirth animation, for example, was being handled primarily by one Maya animator, and the Cerene walk animation was a Blender test animation created by an animator who’s only been with the team for a few months (the walk animation was his first animation for us, and the Cerene dance was his second).

As for what miro is doing, in January and February he’s been setting up a new, clean instance of the Blood Crown assets folder so he can delegate new work to our Maya animators while ensuring everyone has the most up-to-date versions of the project. He’s also looping in some freelance animators we’ve worked with in the past so we have more available animators to work with (the commitment levels of our animators varies quite a bit, if we haven’t mentioned already). The goal here is to create some additional poses and more elaborate variations to existing animations. If you liked the little hair sweep Cerene did in the Seed of Rebirth animation, this is what we mean by more elaborate variation.

With several animators once again working on the main production, this is where our new production coordinator James shines. It’s hard for miro to animate and manage all the communication with artists at the same time, so James helps organize all the communication from animators and other artists so it’s easier for miro to review incoming work and provide his notes without writing messages for hours and hours. James was already doing this with the Blender team, if you noticed the speed at which content was being coordinated there.

This final paragraph below is directly from miro, summing everything up.

In short, focusing on Blood Crown going forward will mean the following: I'm delegating other projects to other teams, so I get to focus on Blood Crown production. I'm reworking many transitional and sex animations to bring them up to today's standards. With my full attention I think the new production will be our best release. All work on assets, rigs and environments is being redirected to Blood Crown only, meaning attention won't be divided between almost a dozen characters, but rather to enhance the few characters that count. The Maya team will focus on enhancing and finalizing animations that don't need my direct attention. The Blender team will continue to work on test animations that will progressively include more Blood Crown assets as we transition until they can actively participate in creating Blood Crown content as well.