soi

[T1] End of November update. I still (sorta) alive! Miruko is coming for real this time. + Spiky update! (Patreon)

Published:

2023-12-01 02:21:40

Imported:

2023-12

Tags:

etc

Content

Greetings! My beloved patrons.

Let me disappointed you right off the bat by updating this end of the month without a real release (I did promised the release to be around the middle of November and still missing the mark by a mile.) What happened to yours truly? Some struggling, changes, and researching happened.

- Around the 2nd week of the month I took myself off grid due to personal reason. Nothing too serious but it took quite a while to fix the problem.

- I renovated my office now with better gears, but it took times to getting used to the new environment. There was a lot of travelling stuff.

- While waiting for the new office. I took some time to research and improve stuff. One of them was Blender 4.0. I have a feeling lately that I am about to hit the absolute limit for how can I utilize only Live2D. One thing I have to be clear. I am not changing my style to 3D or leaving Live2D anytime soon (leaving a program that you have invested 5+ years of learning into is extremely dumb.) But I have seen a lot of potential to do 2D style animation from Blender 4.0 too, so I wish to adapt my animation skill to something more flexible.

- I was also taking my time to research a bit more on video editing and animation. I am experimenting something new (see below.)

In summary, I have taken care of many things in November. It's quite settled now, I am sorry for taking much longer time than promised.

Incoming spike effects!

You might have come across something like this in doujinshi or CG drawings. I don't really know what it was called, so I am going to call it "Spike Effects" for now..

Spike effects in still images are easy to perceive as a mean to convey twitching or a sudden surge of pleasure.

As I have infamous known for being obsessed to the details in every second.

I think to myself "why stop at second? Let's go to millisecond level of details."

Thus, I tried to implement this effect to some of my works as a proof-of-concept project (which is really hard to time it correctly.) The main problem about this effect is it only existed for a few frames. If I left it on for too long, it will become very distracting. But if it was too short, it might won't show up in lower framerates at all.

1. [Yoruichi] example (the spikes exposing too long. Ended up looks like artifacts.)

2.[Hilda] example (the spike exposing too short or timing was off.)

A lot of failed experimentation has been made on the way.

So I have researched on this for quite a bit to make this effect looks best (not distracting, not looking like artifacts, not getting lost in low framerates renders.)

These are (kinda) result renders that I will try to make it in the next release.

1.50 FPS

2.25 FPS

3.Slo-mo

As you may noticed, using in right amount is hard to implement. Still, if not going too crazy about it and using at the right moment should convey even more details in animations.

One big reason why I have used Miruko project as a testing ground for this technique is how fast and hard the action of this project going to be. These spike effects will only showing in faster/harder animations, limited the utilization not to bloated the idea too much. It might be just now and then in milliseconds (literally) but should be worth it.

As I am pretty excite to use this effects on the future projects. I am also understand that the core of this page is not to share technical stuff like this. With that, I apologize for derailed this a bit too much. The Miruko project will be re-scheduled to be release around next week. As well as the poll and the commission opening season will be coming up soon. Stay tune for more!