June 2020 Animation Challenge - RETROSPECT (Patreon)

Back in June I did this animation challenge where I would give myself 24 hours to produce an animation.  I had to have it finished and rendered before the end of the day, but I could use any character or environmental assets I had prepared in the past.

For this little write-up I'll break it down into sections for each day and go over my undertaking for each animation.  Hopefully I can shed some light on my process and what I learned.

DAY 1 - Dwarf Sucking Balls

Since I was going to use Eevee in order to render fast enough for this project, I decided to start with the assets I had used the most in that engine: Orcs and Dwarves.  Luckily the set I used for my previous animation with them was completely set up and lit, so I just had to make adjustments.  I had an idea for the pose the day before, so I got to work.

I spent about 2 hours prepping, framing, lighting, and posing.  Then I spent about another 7-8 hours on animation and finishing.  Having 4 characters in the scene really slowed me down, even if their animation was trivial.

I didn't have to simulate anything or do any post-processing, so I thought I had plenty of time to render.  However when I ran a test render and did the calculations I realized that I was cutting it awfully close on time, even for Eevee, and that I'd have to adjust my strategy for the coming days.  You see I had the Sindel & Cassie animation coming up, and I was working on that during the evenings.  Since it was difficult to render and edit at the same time, I ended up having to budget separate times for each.

In the end I got it out just in time.  It was a pretty simple day though, and I still had plenty of energy.

DAY 2 - Sindel Cumshot

I wasn't sure what I was going to do this day so I spent the first hour preparing and coming up with the concept.  I had to convert the characters and environment to work in Eevee and I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the right angle and lighting, but I rightfully assumed that I would save time on animation.  This all took about 3-4 hours.

For the animation I wanted to try doing a half-and-half method where I would animate the beginning part of the cumshot, and then use cloth sim for the rest.  I ran some tests, but ran into some snags during the animation.  It turned out kind of jank, especially due to the lack of motion blur in Eevee.  Thankfully, all of the animation was trivial and I was only rendering 7 seconds.  I started rendering around the same time as the day before, but got the animation out earlier because there were less frames.

Converting everything to Eevee turned out to be quite easy and produced a decent result, but struggling with the simulation costed me a lot of time.  Thankfully, the process gave me the idea for the next day's animation.

DAY 3 - Sindel Erection

Originally I was going to try to find a different pairing for this day, but I couldn't find anything good enough and I decided to go with my idea from the day before: a really simple one-character animation with minimal prep and no simulation.  This was certainly the easiest day.

I spent the first 3 hours just posing and lighting.  I was pretty relaxed so I tried out some different angles and lighting set-ups.  Animation took me about 3-4 hours, giving me plenty of time for the render.

At this point in the week I was pretty relaxed and I was certain I would get through the challenge one way or another.

DAY 4 - Tifa and Scarlet

This is where things got difficult.  I had downloaded these two models the week before, but hadn't prepared them at all.  Since they were already ported and set-up in Blender by the same creator, I assumed there would be minimal issues there.  I was mostly right, but it turned out other issues would crop up.

I spent way too long preparing the animation.  I built the set from scratch using an FF7 environment as reference and I was having trouble lighting Tifa.  Things were getting sketchy, so I decided to re-imagine the post to frame out any penetration and cut the runtime down to ~5 seconds.  This would save me hours of animation and render time.

The animation itself turned out pretty well, but at the time due to the lack of familiarity I was pretty frustrated with the rigs and ended up fighting them a lot.  The breast, hair, and slap animation turned out kind of iffy.  In retrospect, I really like some parts of those models but I would want to make some changes for any future animation.  Their skin materials had some strange differences and Scarlet is slightly more stylized than Tifa.

I was approaching the deadline for my Sindel & Cassie animation, but I had to spend most of that night rendering.  I barely got it out on time.  I knew I was going to use Wonder Woman and Power Girl the next day, but I just didn't know how.

DAY 5 - Power Girl Sucking Balls

I wanted to make something nice with this pairing, but I had some time constraints to consider.  I settled on a re-imagining of my day 1 pose, but in a POV format.  The familiar pose would save me time on animation so that I could focus on everything else, but I didn't quite know how it would turn out.

I spent about 4-5 hours on preparation.  I made the set from scratch again, tried out a lot of different lighting set-ups, and ended up on a pose I liked.  Near the end of the process I decided I wanted to bring the lasso back in as a practical light, so that costed me some more time.

Then I animated really fast.

I think I might have spent 2-3 hours on that 10 seconds of animation.  It was the fastest I had done ever done anything.  Since the pose was so fresh in my head, it went really smoothly and I knew exactly what to do.  I've spent more time on 16 frame loops.  I was comforted by the fact that I was never this fast back in the SFM days, so maybe I had gotten a little better.

Anyways, I got that out pretty early and felt a bit of relief that the week was over.  I still had to finish the Sindel and Cassie animation, but at least it wasn't as much of an undertaking.

Final Thoughts

At the end of last year we did a little survey and a lot of people thought I should work on my process and animation.  So part of the reason for this event was to challenge myself in those categories.  Beeple has famously done this for a long time, even if it's mostly still renders, so I wanted to see what it was like.

It turned out that it wasn't quite as hard as I expected.  I've spent so much time on large projects recently that there was something almost comforting about having set time limits for really small-scale ideas.  I don't think I would want to do it very often, but it was a nice change of pace.

If you're an animator I would recommend trying this out once in a while, even if you're just getting started.  Maybe I'll do this again in the future, it would be cool to bring a few more artists into the challenge.