Mai Learns Balance (on a dick) (Patreon)

"It’s one of the most difficult exercises for a ninja. Keep a clear mind and physical balance, but with a partner actively trying to distract you. Other partners try conventional distractions like banging sticks together or bringing in a cute puppy. You have a different idea."

Animation by Hyliam and sound by Laarel.

– Secretary Karissa

VR 4K

VR 1080p

3D 4K

3D 1080p

VRPorn Downloads Link

This animation was important to me, as it was my first time working together with Hyliam to bring you fresh VR content. It was also important as I had a lot of ideas to try all at once. It took way too many renders to get it just right, but it did pay off in the end, as well as teach me a lot about my workflow with Premier, After Effects, and SFM. The last Cortana animation I did by BayernSFM had a little bit of green screening and opacity play, but this was the first major animation to require both, as well as animating the background scene separately and editing out some mistakes.

1) I rendered the scene with the actors' alpha set to 0 on all parts so that the models would be see through, but still produce shadows. Otherwise the green screen trick would be too apparent. This allowed me to have a basis for the entire scene.

2) I then rendered the actors separately without the background.

3) I also rendered the background without the actors or their shadows so I could use a trick to make the water loop perfectly. VR requires perfect immersion in my opinion, so having water stutter at the end of each loop just would not do.

4) I realized at the end that the original render did not remove the model's eyes, so I had to remove those manually in After Effects.

With all of those steps, I was able to green screen the actors into the scene, while looping the water, as well as maintaining the shadows on the scene and removing the eyes that I couldn't alpha out. I lost count of how many renders it took to do this. Lesson learned? When trying something new, don't waste time rendering the entire animation in 4k. 1080p is fine for checking stuff out.

I will point out I am also practicing using clone stamp in after effects as well as content aware fill, so parts that don't look right or out of place could be removed, especially in regards to SFM's limitations or imperfect models. It's little things like these that make a video even better in VR, and what I take pride in noticing that other artists andf studios do not.

Anyways, back to work I go. Enjoy!

-Dark Zalivstok