Another technical preview (Patreon)

Hey guys, another sneak peek under the hood of the animation process. I might have mentioned couple of times that making "transition" animations (not directly sex related) is very time consuming. Well I had this idea for a while, and I knew that for larger projects it will be almost necessary:

MOTION CAPTURE

So I bought a bunch of kinects 2, subscribed to the software needed (surprisingly almost as expensive as the hardware O.O) and embraced my inner lady!

http://webmshare.com/Jej6v

Attached you can see a video of a simple motion. Obviously thing like this could be animated by hand, but it is a good example to show the process. On the left you can see the direct recording, with the skeleton. In the middle is the import to SFM - due to some limitations of the kinect, the rotation of the wrists and fingers is not recorded. Also generally the motions are sometimes recorded incorrectly. Fortunately it's usually stuff that can be fixed, hence the right side, the final animation. (the feet look a bit weird, but Lana is supposed to be wearing high heels in this one). Again, seems pointless for this one (it's not actualy), but it allows me to do stuff like walking very realisticly. And animating walking is VERY HARD.

When I moved to Poser and Daz and away from SFM, I knew that there are going to be obstacles to be cleared before I can do fully animated projects again. They are:

1) Animation software - SFM is very powerful animation tool, and doing the same animation in Poser is pretty difficult and I dare says almost impossible in DAZ.

2) Transition animations - animations which take the highest amount of effort, for the lowest amount of screen time. However are absolutely needed to tell a story and tie the sex scenes together.

3) Rendering power.

#3 is the easiest to solve - just throw money at it, and thanks to you and your amazing support I can afford to do that. #1 was a tough nut to crack, but as I mentioned earlier, I figured out a way to animate in SFM and import the final animation into DAZ. And #2 will be hopefuly made much easier with the kinect support.

However as always, this doesn't mean I can record the entire movie within 15 minutes :). I cannot use the mocap for sex scenes and even the scenes I can use it for take a lot of time to record, clean up, get into SFM, fix, get into DAZ, apply final touches and render.

Also as you can imagine, if I want the animations to be sexy and feminine, I myself have to move in a sexy and feminine way, which makes for very awkward videos :D

Holy shit, this blew into a wall of text :D Anyway, let me know what you think about this and if you are interested in hearing technical background like this.

As for the progress, we almost have the story intro animated, and are planning to record the VO so we can animate the lipsync.