Animation Breakdown: Sindel Breastsuck (Patreon)

I've been thinking about how to structure this post and I decided I'd try to break it down into sections to give a general idea of how I approach and move through the process of creating an animation.  These sections will be conception, blocking, animating, and polishing.  The lines between them will blur a little bit but I'll try to keep it orderly.

This will be an effort to provide some insight into my animation process, however I will not be going over pre or post production in this breakdown.  That means no modeling, rigging, texturing, editing, sound design, etc.

Conception

My conceptualization of animations with weak or non-existent narrative components is pretty loose.  Often times I'll have an idea in my head, a vague plan on how to execute it, and a blurry vision of what it will look like.

For this animation I knew a few things:

1. This was going to be 1 part of a 3 part animation.

2. The focus was breast sucking.

3. The scene would include Sindel, Cassie, and Sonya.

4. The environment would be the new bath house set I had just developed.

To start I wanted to put together what the scene would look like and nail down key technical challenges for the animation itself.

This was the set I was working with:

Even with a simple set like this, it's important to stay organized.  Everyone works differently, but I like to keep my outliner hierarchy clean and simple:

It's rather obvious, but it will save you a lot of time.  You'll probably hear this principle in all lines of work.

I started putting the scene together and this is the initial pose I landed on:

My goal was to have one character on either side, opening up to the camera in the middle.  Every other part of the animation, like hand placement and posture, was going to be informed by that.  However, there were a few issues with this initial pose that resulted in me moving on to something else:

1. Bad posing.  The character postures were weak and uncomfortable.  If you want your characters to be relaxed, it's very important that you put them in positions that allow them to be relaxed.  Being stooped over in such a way for more than a minute just isn't relaxing.  I could have them extend their legs and bend more at the waist, but then we have issues with height, neck flexion limitations, and weight distribution.

2. Idle hands.  Figuring out what to do with your hands is not only an annoyance in real life, but a frequent problem in animation too.  This is part of the reason I like very physical positions, where characters are pushing and pulling each other.  It brings the hands and arms into focus.  With a more laid back animation like this, the hands had much less to do.  In this initial pose especially, the hands were vital for proper weight distribution and that didn't provide me with many options.

3. Camera angles and lighting.  I wasn't finding many good angles and the lighting was proving to be a challenge.  This was the main reason I decided to move their physical position on the set.

It's not uncommon to re-imagine the scene once or twice before committing to it.  This particular animation was fairly easy because I only really changed it around once, but I kept the main principle throughout.  With less experience, I used to have to do this more often.

Instead of wiping the slate clean, I try to use non-destructive techniques to ensure that I can try out multiple set-ups before I settle on one.  This is easy when you can just key frame the different poses like this:

Anyways, after some changes I ended up with this:

Now we're looking pretty similar to the final product.  The big decision was to bring it all down to a sitting position and place them in a more optimal location for lighting and shooting.  The women were no longer relying on Sindel for balance and there was a lot more options for not only their hands but their movement in general.  I just had to make a few tweaks to bring it together:

I inserted a much lower piece of furniture and ended up with more relaxed positions.  Now all three characters could sit, I had the angles and lighting I wanted, and things looked generally appealing.  I even gave them little pieces of cloth so they didn't have to kneel on the tile.  It's not much, but hey, I try.

Though when putting together these initial pieces you can't just have one frame in mind.  You have to make sure that the characters have the freedom of movement to execute every part of the animation without any issues.  When putting together short loops this is simple, but as your ideas grow in complexity so must your preparation.

Blocking

When you start blocking your animation for sex it's usually going to look a bit different than with traditional subject matters.  It's not just because of the use of loops, but because this kind of animation work requires a high amount of interactivity between the characters in the scene.  This one was particularly complex.

The big thing to understand about animation  —  that might not occur if you've never done it  — is that you can't animate everything at once.  This means that you have to pay careful attention to which things are the 'affectors', and which things are the 'affectees'.  In scientific terms, you have an independent variable and a dependent variable.  Sort of.

There are two separate but similar examples to point to for this.

Ex 1: If you're animating a punch in a fight, there is a clear affector and affectee.  One character throws a punch, the other one gets hit and reacts to it.  

Ex 2: If you're animating a sex scene, like in the missionary position, there is also a clear affector and affectee.  One character thrusts, the other reacts.

Both these examples can grow in complexity according to your design, but they're simple enough to lay out.

With this position I have two independent variables (Cassie and Sonya) and one dependent variable (Sindel).  Cassie and Sonya are both influencing Sindel at the same time, and that poses a number of animation challenges.

Lets say Cassie pushes Sindel.  That interaction can translate to Sonya, which then affects the way Sonya interacts with Sindel, which then translates to Cassie.  This can create a sort of feedback loop and draw out the amount of time and effort spent on the animation.  To use the fighting analogy again, imagine if two characters have both grappled a separate character.  Each character's struggle for control directly affects the other two.

If we're hoping to keep our animation efficient without sacrificing the quality, it's important to devise tactics to deal with this ahead of time.

I settled with a simple method of separation between each character.  As you can see, there are two main interaction points between the two women: Sindel's chest and Sindel's dick.  To eliminate the chance of a conflict, I make sure that either area is only occupied by one woman at a time.

To further increase efficiency, I broke up the two women's own movements into two sections.  Thanks to IK rigging, their hands are not affected by the motions of the rest of their bodies.  This means that I can animate one section without having to worry what the other one is doing.

Now that I had the scope and limitations of the animation dialed in, all I had to do from here was think about what exactly I was going to do with each character.

Animating

Okay, we've finally gotten to the animation section.  It's taken a while to get here, but a lot of this particular scene dealt with prep work and principles.  It's harder to talk about moment-to-moment animation decisions, but I'll do my best to cover certain aspects.

The focus of the animation was the breast sucking, so I needed to develop a technique that made the process much easier and higher quality.  I ended up using a soft body physics cage hooked to an empty with key-framed restraints to each character's mouth.  The result can be seen here, which I posted a while back:

Now all I had to worry about was the character that was sucking instead of having to micromanage the breasts.  Much of my animations have some sort of technical challenge like this, even if they're small.  It helps to break up the monotony and learn new ways of doing things.

With that hurdle crossed, much of the rest of the animation was easy to figure out.  As I planned when blocking the animation, I would have the characters take turns sucking Sindel's breasts.  Since this scene was planned to be less than 2 minutes, I only felt the need to develop one unique loop for each and then fill the time between the loops with original animation.

As a technical note that may not matter to those who haven't animated with Blender: learning and understanding the strengths of both the dope sheet and NLA tracks can save you a lot of time.  Most sex animations make ample use of loops for obvious reasons, and some of Blender's animation tools are well suited for that type of thing.  You'll find similar tools in other 3D software as well.

Much of the extra movements outside of the core animation were decided by the angles I chose.  After I built up the breast sucking, I went through each camera angle I had and marked what frame ranges I wanted from them.  Doing this before-hand allows you to play to the camera and save time animating, but it can restrict your options if you stick too close to what you have laid out.

I decided to start with a crane shot above the characters, then cut to my wide, then cut in to my close-ups.  It's a very simple set-up, but it's all I needed for the scene.  From there I started on the unique animation and built the handjob for each character as well.

Polishing

With the major parts of the animation finished, next came polishing.  It's certainly not my favorite part of the process but it can have its moments.  Often times I get creative block when I run into this section because it requires a lot of creative decisions to happen very quickly.

The bulk of what I consider to be 'polishing' lies within the actual character part of the animation.  Expressions, variations, reactions, etc.  This is the part where I try to breath a little life into the animation.

When I go throughout the animation I have a fairly good idea of what I want each character to feel and express, so I may tackle some of that animation early.  However, when combining everything into a coherent 1-2 minutes you can come across areas that seem disjointed, dry, uncharacteristic, or uncanny.  Correcting everything, and making the whole greater than the sum of its parts, can be a challenge.

This process is made much easier when you have some sort of performance to go off of, like if you have some sort of narrative component.  The script and actors end up making these broad decisions for you, and you get to focus on the fun parts like how to convey the performances.

After I get the animation how I want it, I deal with any extra secondary animation or physics simulations.  Past that I do another pass on the lighting and camera motion, plus anything in the environment.  I could spend forever on this part, tweaking a skin shader, moving lights around, or polishing movements, but eventually I have to let it go.  I do a few test renders to make sure everything's coming out properly and to make sure I have the compositor how I want it, then I'll run a playblast to make sure the motion is right, and then I finally start rendering it.

Conclusion

I hope this was elucidating for those of you who were interested.  There are some parts where I didn't go into much detail, like with lighting and shot composition, but I didn't gather much visual material on it during the process and so I decided to leave that for another time.  This post is getting a little long anyways.

I'm not professionally trained so there's no doubt I do some things differently.  Take everything with a grain of salt because much of my workflow is optimized for my niche.  There are many ways to go about the process.

If you have any questions about the animation that I didn't quite get to with this post then I'm happy to answer them.  Also — if you made it to the end — congratulations!