M2F HD Headshot TG Animation (Patreon)

A head focused animation of a Franc turning into a Francine

Sorry, no real nudity at all this time because I wanted to focus on the shoulder and above area. I even wanted to add clothes but the scene was already too heavy, more about that further below. There's also to mention that this is the first animation with the new "Genesis 9" character generation.
Feel free to give me the good, the bad and the ugly as feedback. I always want to improve.

I still felt quite insecure about my workflow with Blender, especially on the head since I didn't really do anything with HD details together with the face/head yet. That also includes everything on the head being Blender particle hair instead of mesh hair.
By now I can say that the workflow I developed works nicely all around and I'm proud of it, it's just A LOT of work.^^
The one thing I'll have to improve going forward is the viewport performance I received by going for a insane polygon count for the main body. I'll have to tune it down a bit but I'll try to avoid loss in fidelity as much as possible.

For those who are interested here's a bit more information about the process of this animation:

I first rendered it in 4K and it took like 2-3 days. There's a few issues which I couldn't ignore and which had to be re-rendered. The major issue was that the skin transition I had in mind didn't work out and I only saw it after it got rendered how terrible it looked. I basically made every morph a controller for the corresponding area to also change the skin. It had sharp transition edges though and it didn't look good, had to get scrapped and I've to develop something different for future animations. The re-rendered main version is 1440P now because it was like double as fast to render. I also wanted to use volumetrics, basically a subtle atmospheric effect to blend together character and background better. It looked fine at first glance but in some camera angles it had some weird noise. I then looked up tutorials to render the volumetrics as a seperate layer with a different render engine and put it together after rendering which worked technically really well and fixed the noise issue but because this scene was so slow and heavy I constantly got crashes (I generally got occassional crashes but doing it like that was like immediatly as I started rendering one frame). In the final version I settled down for "Mist". It's doing basically the same but doesn't have the nice light absorption effect of volumetrics.
Furthermore the transformation effect isn't as pronounced as I thought it would be. I put a lot of work into creating morphs but it turns out that moving the camera like that significantly reduces the impact of the effect. It looked good without body and camera motion but I've to make sure to make morphs a bit more pronounced when I plan to have those 2 factors in place and this is a nice reference for that.

I'll sit down and immediatly work on the next animation. The nerd to athletic girl walk transition is still planned to be next, I just wanted to make sure that parts of my scene don't fall apart in the process when I do FULL body this time. Reducing the mesh density will help to speed up the process a lot because I won't have to deal with the few issues I had on this one. I'll try to get a rough WIP done before christmas but no promises.


I added a 1440P and a 1080P mobile device optimized version down below.
You'll also find it here (please download, it's terribly compressed in the MEGA preview):
MEGA LINK
If the link is dead you'll find it on my MEGA reward folders under the Gold Tier category -> Patreon exclusive animations for now.

Have a nice day. <3