Artist Ramblings (Patreon)

Hope all of you are doing well! I just wanted to jot down some thoughts I've been having lately regarding my works. Lately I've been having a lot of thoughts relating to how I feel about my work, where I'm at with it, and how I tackle it. The latest sif x thrud animation really compounded a lot of these thoughts and made me think about them more than I usually would. So this will be a little personal journal entry of sorts. If you're not interested in that sorta thing, that's fine and you can skip the rest of this and continue about your day!

For a while now I've been wanting to take my work and make more out of it. For the most part I've been just a person that makes short loops and that's about it. While I don't think there's anything wrong with that, once you do something for a while you tend to look for ways to mix things up and make it more interesting. I've talked forever about wanting to inject more story elements into my stuff, and I feel like with the last animation I actually figured out a nice little way to incorporate some story into the scene. All of this was a creative little "happy accident" as well.

While lighting the main scene I wanted to figure out a way to justify lighting on Thrud's face. While it's 3D and lights can be completely arbitrary and often are, I just wanted to try and figure out a way to do it if I could. While thinking about it I thought, "Since they're in a wooden cabin style environment, maybe there's a crack in the wall since it's old. I can have light beaming through the crack to light her face." While discussing this idea with RadRoach he mentioned maybe showing the crack before so it makes more sense, eventually that lead to me thinking "Hey, instead of it being just a crack, what if it was a larger hole/crack made because of Thrud accidently hitting the house with her hammer?". Now it gives reason for her mom to be "punishing" her. So instead of just having a loop of fucking, we now have a little story to go along with it. It gives way more interesting results in the final animation if those little story beats can be included. I also had plans to include a scene where someone comes by and asks if everything is alright because they here grunting, and having Sif try to discretely say everything ok, and Thrud being embarrassed trying to stay hidden. However I had to scrap that idea since I started feeling burnout before even finishing the rest of it. This is the biggest reason why I feel a bit disappointed by this animation, because it could have been a lot better but it fell short of expectations.

That burnout feeling I get, happens on a lot of projects, especially ones that are more than just a loop+some variation. It's hard for me to stick onto one project for more than a month unless that motivation stays for a while. So I feel like I'm always at odds with myself because as I said before, I want more from my work. I want to do a little more than just loops. But there's a wildly inconsistent barrier that I hit that makes me just not want to work on a project anymore. I think a lot of comes from improper planning, but there's other factors there for sure. When working on an animation I don't have all the details laid out usually. I just have a vague idea of a direction I want to go, try to achieve that and sometimes it works out, others not so much. There are plenty of ways to plan out an animation, but that time also kinda cuts into the limited energy I have for a project, so if I do too much planning I feel like I'll end up getting burned out before even really getting any work down. It's a balance that I haven't figured out yet, and I don't know if I ever will but it's an important thing for me to note down and keep track of every now and then I think.

So beyond me boo-hooing there were a lot of positive things from the animation as well. The lighting and atmosphere I think I nailed what I was going for. Sure there's room for improvement but I'm really damn happy with how it looks, at least for the main scene. I finally feel like after all these years lighting is finally starting to click more and I can understand and find reason behind my intention of lights, which is something I definitely lacked before. I think I've definitely found a lighting style I like and want to go for more with future animations.

On top of that I've also been digging into Blender's NLA editor more. If you know nothing about Blender it's basically a system that lets you take your animations, make them into a clip of sorts, and change things about them, like speed of the animation, transitioning between them and other things like that. It's actually an interesting system but using it can kinda like reading some ancient language. It's not a very intuitive system at all and desperately needs an overhaul imo. Anyway I toyed with that system a bit more on this animation and figured some of it out, and see how I can use some of it to make animations a little longer and interesting while making it easier to do. So we'll see where that ends up.

Alright, if you made it this far thanks for reading! I hope this was a little nice insight for those that enjoy these kinda things. I feel like lately with the nun project and this, I've been super busy but haven't had a lot to show for it. So it really means a lot that you all are being patient with me and still supporting me while I work through this shit. Next animation I'll probably be doing something simple to help recover from all the thoughts and feelings on this last project, which a WIP will be posted sometime in the week.

Again thanks for the support, hope you're all doing well and I appreciate you all for making this possible! May the smut continue onward!