Ahri animation on hold (Patreon)

So unfortunately the Ahri animation I've decided to put on hold for now. I say on hold, but in reality as with most animation I probably won't go back to it unless some random ass inspiration strikes. I got it animated about 80% to complete, and you can see what I've do so far here. To make up for not posting anything and putting this on hold I'll be uploading a quick animation of Viper from Valorant I did in the past day to make up for it.


So why am I stopping when I'm so close to finishing? If you don't care much about an artists ramblings or introspection then you can ignore the rest of this post: the TL;DR is gettin' lost in the sauce.

Wtf does that mean? Well I've been working on this animation for about a week now. I was intending for it to be about 20ish seconds total. Some simple idle animations and then maybe about 10 seconds of ass shaking. But what I ended up with was about 20+ seconds of idle animation and once I finally got to the ass shaking part of the animation I just couldn't get things to look right. Now I want to explain that there are completely different workflows for doing sex loops like I normally do, and this kind of idle character animation. Ideally with the normal character animation you do a blocking>spline>polish workflow, where as with short sex loops most people use more of a straight ahead or layered approach. If you're not too familiar with what that means this website is a good primer that explains it decently enough.

I've always preferred a layered or straight ahead workflow compared to blocking, which works out great for most of the animations that I do. However when I'm not doing loops it makes animating other things a bit of a pain. As explained in the article one of the big downsides to doing a straight ahead method is that it's easy to lose sight of the important bits of your animation, and it all because sort of a muggy mess, where nothing stands out. And after doing 20+ seconds of idle animation thats definitely how I see it. I've been looking at this animation for so long it just all looks like a complete mess and needs more polish, but since everything looks like a mess it's hard to pinpoint where things need to be fixed, what needs to be pushed, changed, etc. Obviously this is a good time to get feedback from others, but even with that feedback looking at this I feel nothing but dread. So much to fix and polish. That last 10%-20% can easily take as much time as the initial 80% did.

This definitely isn't the first time this sorta thing has happened, it's happened many time in other animations but now it's sorta fully clicked as to why I hit points in animation and just hate working on it. Part of this is getting overly ambitious because I always want to push more into my animations but don't properly plan for it. So this is definitely a wake up call to put more time into planning, but also understanding why I have that breaking point when animating. After a while my brain just kinda blanks and loses sight of why I was animating in the first place and it's really hard to recover on a project when that happens. Thankfully though I look at this in a more positive light than negative this time around. I can look at the negative emotions and say "hey that's ok", move on, and start work anew.

Not sure if that explains all of it well, or if it's all just kinda word vomit, but hopefully it makes some sense. Thanks for reading if you made it through, I hope you have a great day, and thanks for sticking around. <3