Update on the animations, re-doing animation with mocap (Patreon)

Hello! Sorry about the lack of updates on the animations, I've been animating them but I've come to the realization that hand animating these is gonna take forever.

So I've decided to scrap what I've had so far and invested in motion capture equipment.

The shorter animation is coming out relatively soon, as it has been re-animated by hand and just needs a bit more polish then a render and it's done, but the upcoming full animation will be about 1 and a half to 2 minutes long, and I was only really a quarter of the way done with it.

That's why I investing in motion capture equipment, as it'll produce significantly better results faster than if I had just done it by hand. It should be way more realistic and lifelike compared to my traditional hand animation (not literal hand animation, animating it all manually).

I've been working on other projects in the meantime however, I've started another trek into better cloth simulation tech, and I'm gonna start exploring avenues like Houdini and Syflex for cloth simulation. I loved Marvelous Designer, but the quality of the sims actually isn't particularly accurate, so I'm hoping the two programs I've listed will solve this issue.

Syflex is the same cloth simulation software used by Moving Picture Company, the VFX house behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, specifically for the cloth in the blueberry scenes, so I'm hoping I'll be able to figure it out and get it into an actual animation if I can't use Houdini, which Houdini should hopefully be enough. It's still supported in most software today. I'm hoping to get it working in Cinema4D but it seems the exact version I need has serious issues working on Windows 10 (and I'm on 11) so they basically wiped it from the fucking internet and I can't find a single download for it. 

Specifically C4D R20, so if anyone knows where I can find a version of R20, I'd greatly appreciate it, and I'll even throw in an Archive link if you can find one for me before I find a working version (and it has to work before I send the link).

But, I had a whole talk about cloth on Twitter that I'll summarize here since it was pretty long.

Basically, while Marvelous Designer records tension and stress maps, it doesn't seem like it actually simulates the cloth to account for said tension and stress, which means cloth doesn't ride up like it usually would IRL. This can actually be seen in Star of the Show, where the bottom of the cloth on the legs is still pretty unstretched, and doesn't seem to really shrink as the rest of the shorts expand. Also, cloth tearing is possible but extremely improbable and inconsistent in MD as new tears would require a brand new animation, and recording a new set of keyframes for cuts in the animation ruins the quality of the animation, which means most of the cloth has to be simulated in a single go, unless I can find a way to make edits to cloth without messing up the animation when I go to continue the simulation. It doesn't restart the simulation exactly where it left off, and messes up the shape and look of the cloth. Also, new edits to the cloth just straight up deletes previous simulations, so multiple models would need to be produced just for the cloth tearing. Hence, why its impractical and inconsistent. 

This shouldn't be an issue with Houdini or Syflex however as they're designed to be more realistic (from what I understand), more so than Marvelous Designer.

Marvelous Designer while extremely great, just wasn't built for this kind of work, more for games and designing clothes.

Again, the animations are coming, the mocap hardware is gonna make it infinitely easier, faster to produce, and way better than just hand animation like how I've been working this entire time.