W.I.P. December 2021 (Patreon)

Hello Loyal Patreons,

Happy New Year to all! I hope everyone has had a nice couple of weeks. It's time once again for a re-cap of what has been happening this last month. As you may have seen, we've done the Kingdom Hearts Christmas with a whole bunch of pictures designed to both arouse and test out a few features in Blender. The pics are starting to look better as I learn more about how the Blender compositor works. The big thing I've introduced is splitting the render into two parts, foreground & background so I can edit them separately and blend them together for the final product. This is child's play compared to the kind of things that can be achieved because I can exclude certain things from certain lights and get a much nicer balance for the lighting. I don't really understand all of it yet, but I've been going through a series of YouTube tutorials to expand my knowledge. Then there is another pro course I plan to take later for further understanding. But for now I'm just trying to understand one concept at a time via YouTube & then implement it in the next project.

This month's patreon money has gone towards January sales on some specific outfits I've been waiting to go on sale to fill in a few gaps. Aqua's chest straps have massively underperformed so I wanted something actually fitted for a daz model, rather than something I've put together myself. And then there are some heart themed chokers, some bondage gear & a slingkini that I want too. All things I've tried and failed to implement myself from other models & I want properly fitted versions of.

But what's been happening with the big projects? Unfortunately it's been a rather bad month all things considered. Let's start with:

So where we left off last month I had rebuilt Medli to fix the rig problem & was getting back to testing and posing when I immediately discovered a brand new problem that I had apparently caused while rebuilding her where her spine is sunk way down low by her hips. The model it's self isn't affected but it's causing very weird deformation around her hips. This means that I once again have to roll back through the different versions, find where it's gone wrong and then redo everything a second time. I haven't done this yet because having only just done this already, I need a little break from Medli before going back over everything again so she's not been touched for a couple of weeks now while I get ready and also deal with another disaster. Once I've got the Aqua animation done I'll give both the Medli project at least a month of solid attention but for now I want to focus on dealing with:

So I got the Aqua animation fully rendered and now that I'm able to see the whole thing it's just really really bad. I've made some massive mistakes in scenes 1 & 2 that mean I have to do them all over again as well. Scenes 3 & 4 just need some tweaking and they will be alright, but it seems that I've permanently overwritten a bunch of the animation which is why it looks so weird and jerky. The lighting in 2-3 has turned out pretty consistent but there is something off about 1's so I'll just copy the light in from 2. Other than the missing animation, taken on their own the stills looks pretty good:

As of right now I've finished re-doing scene 2 completely & that's going for rendering now. Scene one is mostly redone too, I've improved the cloth physics as well so all that's left there is to have her track to the camera and then add her expressions.

Scene 3 needs the least work and will probably only take me an afternoon so I'm almost completely caught back up with my 'reshoots' by the end of the week everything should be fixed and then I only have the cum at the end of scene 4 to worry about.

I'm not going to lie to you guys, this whole thing has lead to a rather frustrating couple of week where basically everything has turned out to be broken and requiring fixing in some way or another & it's really been getting me down. It's typical that everything would wait until the holidays to fall apart. But now that I've gotten the work done (the KH work, Medli's still there) it really does look a lot better. It sucks to have to write off so much time recovering old ground, but I can't expect to get everything right the first time. Failing is part of learning & I've learnt all sorts of stupid things not to do next time!

But it's not all bad news though. The issues with scene4 are rather minimal and mostly this one looks really nice so here is a little look at them:

Also I've made some more improvements to the render process and I've dropped the render times down to 30 seconds per frame, which is a massive achievement &  makes things much more efficient.

I've continued to put the finishing touches on the first six girls (technically 5 because Namine got corrupted and needs to be redone, which will be second time this has happened to her) which means adding in alt textures for sweat, tanlines, makeups & things like that: 

Adding in the final outfits and facial controls I desire & they are all pretty much ready to be wrapped up into their final versions. I will probably delay actually finalizing each of them until the first time they are need for an animations so just in case I want to change something I can. But lets be honest, I'm definitely going to wind up re doing at least one of them. Experience has taught be this much at least.

And then we have:

Actually got a few pages wrapped this month since I needed a break from everything breaking & put some time in here to take my mind of things for a while. We're getting ever closer the the end now since Meredhel & Kala's little meeting has concluded, the gang is back together & they are about to start a short conversation wherein Meredhel will convince them to take the secret passage in the garden back to the palace. We then have a short scene of them opening the passage, walking through it and into the the dungeons where the chapter will end with them heading off to the kitchens. 

The passageway and the dungeon will need to be built but they will be really really easy since they don't need to be very detailed and only need to be seen from one angle. That'll get knocked up easily. Why is it so important that we see all this? Well the presence of this passageway will be important later & I want to introduce it now in book 1 & this is the best chance. I also want to remind everyone that the guy with the broken hand from chapter 5 is in that dungeon, because that will come up later too. Sooner in fact than the passageway.

And there we go. Not the best month, all things considered. But I'll have my first proper Blender animation finished by the end of the month, it'll look great because I took the time to make sure it does & everything will be awesome. I'll probably become a millionaire or the mayor or something as a result. That'll be fun, I'll keep you guys posted.

Take it easy my dudes,