March 2022 Animation Challenge Retrospective (Patreon)

Some people were interested so I thought I'd make a post and go into a little more detail on the animations I did for the challenge last month.  I'll be dumping most of this month's content this week.

Day 1:

I wanted to start off the challenge with something simple, so I went with a concept including models from my recent public port.  They're optimized for my workflow and they're more efficient than any of my other models, so working with them is fast.  The pose itself was easy and it had been a while since I had done any futa on futa, so it seemed like a no-brainer for day 1.

Before I posed anything I knew what camera angle I was going to go for and that I was working with a single light source.  The environment sort of popped up around that foundation.  I had a set I put together for something else but I wanted to try out some of these animated rain materials I had laying around, so I rearranged a few things and made the window.

Since it was a single light source, I had to cheat a bit to get the right falloff and fill so that the right details weren't obscured.  Above is a 7-light set-up of mostly fills and keys.  There was only one camera angle to worry about so I could get as particular as I wanted.

Everything else from there was pretty smooth sailing, so I decided I had extra time to do sound for it.  I had to get a little creative to make the vocals work but I think it went alright.

Day 2:

I felt that I could take on a bigger challenge for day 2, so I did just that.  I wanted to come up with something that was technically challenging, but still focused on what I'm most familiar with, which is character animation.  And so I came up with this jungle gym.

Lady Dimitrescu and the witches seemed like a good opportunity since I'd never done anything with them all in the same scene before.  I put together the pose in my head pretty fast but I wasn't quite sure where to put Daniela, the middle character.  The other two, Cassandra and Bela, were easy and posed less of a challenge because they were more or less disconnected from each other.  I thought it might be a bit disappointing if Daniela just watched, so I stuck her on breast duty, knowing that it could cost me a lot of time.  Now her animation would be affected by Lady Dimitrescu's chest movements, which would be affected by both Cassandra and Bela.  So I set myself up for quite a challenge.  Now I'd have to keep in mind what the other characters did and constrain their movements accordingly, or else I'd end up with way too much work on my plate with Daniela.

The lighting and environment came together relatively easily.  I was torn on having some candles provide a strong back light, and what distance to keep the back wall at, but I ended up resolving all that by the time I finished animating.  Candles are my crutch so I try to avoid putting them in scenes when they aren't the primary light source these days.

I tried a little tactic to show Cassandra's legs gripping Lady Dimitrescu's dick, but I needed to put more work into it and I just didn't have the time.  I used the plane that was bound to the legs to drive a displacement modifier, similar to how you see ripples done these days.  This would give the impression of skin being pushed up over the legs.  However I needed to develop it further by having the dick and legs deform under the ripple.  Something to try in the future though.

For the jizz I just used some cards since I knew it wouldn't really be interacting with anything.  Unfortunately it can't always be that easy.

Day 3:

Oh boy, day 3.  I liked how I did with the circus that was day 2, but I've done plenty of cluster fucks before (literally).  Coming up with a short story and animating it would be a newer and potentially more difficult challenge.

I went to bed the previous day thinking about what the hell I was going to do and by the time I got to work the next day I had a pretty firm idea.  Time was especially worrying with this once, not only because of all of the extra animation, but all of the extra rendering as well.  I needed to have all of my shots conceptualized before I even opened Blender.

There was no way I was doing this with any of my older models, so I went with the new ones again.  The set is the same one from day 1, just a different corner.  The lighting was... questionable at first but I think it worked out.

The biggest challenge aside from putting it all together was the corset.  Animating clothing is a NIGHTMARE.  Period.  A toga or a cloak is one thing, but something like a corset, or boots, or anything with straps is a whole different beast.  Composite materials, anything with 3 dimensions, anything with hard surfaces like metals, things of that nature.  All awful.  It really says something that I wasn't even concerned about animating the breasts.

I just kind of went for it.  It took a lot of iterating, but I got there.  The lace holding the corset together got so totally fucked that I had to make them just sort of rip and disappear.  In the end it sort of animates like a boned corset.  If you squint.

That part took so long that for the next shot I just said fuck it and made the clothes just drop.  It doesn't look good but it works.

Everything past that was a race, but there were no big technical challenges.  In order to save time, I had to finish each shot one at a time so that I could send them off to render while I worked on the other ones.  This means I didn't have as much control over the editing or pacing, but thankfully it worked out fine.

Day 4:

For some reason on day 4 I had the bright idea to put an incredibly hard pose in the poll.  Guess which one won.

At first I had something simple in mind but since I had worked with those characters so often, I wanted to make it more interesting.  I had an idea, said "I have to do that", and paid no mind to the consequences.  That may have been a mistake.

The 'facial' part of the animation was one thing.  I knew it would take me a certain amount of time to just get things looking acceptable, but I hadn't considered the actual hand job animation.  Usually that kind of thing is a breeze but I forgot just how awful Sindel's swim suit was to work with.  The topology on that thing is something else.  To make it work on a pin-up I did with her a while back I used a combination of shrink wrap modifiers, smoothing modifiers, subdivisions, and shape keys.  Trying to animate all that was... not so great.  So as a result, I spent way too much time on the part of the animation that wasn't even supposed to be the challenging part.

The actual facial part was something I had done plenty of times before, but I knew Eevee just wasn't the right engine for it.  So I had to go back through and spot render those parts in Cycles, then combine them in post.

You can actually see an artifact from that in the image above.  The left shadow in the red circle is the original Eevee contact shadow and the right shadow is from the Cycles superimposition.

For some reason I didn't realize that you can't really loop facials, but I hadn't really set up or planned for a second camera so that I could cut around the loop.  So I had to settle with this weird blur transition thing.  I sort of limped to the finish line on this one.

Day 5:

Licking my wounds from day 4, I wanted to do something fun.  So back to the new models I went.

I haven't done many animations with chubby characters so I'm still trying to get a feel for how I should go about it.  What to simulate, what to displace, what to hand animate, etc.  I'm getting closer to something that really works and it's not as intimidating as it was before.  I just don't like sticking a bunch of physics cages on a model and hoping the simulations all work out.

I thought I had something great for her rear, but it really doesn't show up on camera very well unfortunately.  If I had more time I would have tweaked it.

Originally I wanted the animation to take place in the middle of a pentagram or something, but that would have made a few things like lighting and framing a little more difficult.  In the end I'm happy with where I arrived, since there's a lot more activity with this concept.  There's a little more story to it.  Plus, the lighting is really intuitive.

I had this second shot planned but I decided to develop the story/concept through the environment more in the first shot, so I cut it.

Conclusion

Hopefully some of this was illuminating.  Next time I do an animation challenge I want to do more stuff like I did on day 3.  It's just hard to plan all of that on the fly.  At some point I might do something like a 'one month challenge' where I just put something out every day for a month, but it could be small stuff like images.  Or maybe I could do an animation challenge where I have an overarching story in mind and I just do 5 different scenes over the 5 days.  We'll see.

Thanks for reading!