[T7]Elphelt Valentine prelude. The summarize of techniques I have adopted so far. (Patreon)

Greetings, my T7 and T10 patrons!

Welcome to something neat I have cooking up (for both learning and eye candy purposes.) As I realized that I don't have enough time to crunch a proper Elphelt project before the end of this year, I have always wanted to summarize the technique I have learned so far. So let's dive into it!

The prelude, what is it?

As the name implies, it still far from the actual final project (it's only 1/4 of the scenes for this one.) Having only the butt panel is kinda awkward but also inducing anticipation at the same time I guess lol.

That being said, the main meat of this update is to visualize how good the animation can look if you keep stacking the minor details together.

All of these scenes implemented the "wrapping" layers in Live2D Cubism (works like a layer of photoshop applications but with animation instead.) The more you stacking them up with their own animation scripts the more variety the animation could be.

1. Breathing

Comment: Aka the idle animation, this serve as a placeholder when the character doesn't do anything, prevent the total halt that will kick viewers right of the immersion. However, I tend to not over animated the idle animations for they can make the characters look floaty (especially the hair parts.)

Comment: The partner's idle animation is also one of the vital parts of the idle scenes. Noted that I tend to loop the main and partner animation with different velocity. It helps with the isometrical feeling, emphasizing the individual being, they are not just a big pile of sex that always moving together.

Comment: What if I tell you these 3 animation stacks are what I have used on almost every single one of my projects up to the middle of 2022? For the most part, this is good enough. The meaty thrusting script that I have learned so far is  0-8-16-30 (you can refer to my Live2D files.) Put it simply, a little drawn out winding time makes the thrusting feels more weighty.

Comment: Sometimes, adding subtle animation in between the main one on the different wrapping layer is more useful and easy to control. Let's say if the above was thrusting, this one is the jiggle reaction to the thrust.

Comment: The spikes effect is incredibly challenging to implement, but for the sake of reference, I have slowed down the animation. There are two types of this effect "the sparking" and "the speeding". The sparking emphasize the overwhelming or shocking body reactions. While the speeding is working like speed lines in manga. So far, only the sparking is useful (for me), the speeding one has been evolved into something else that I believe to be better.

Comment: This is the solution for the speeding effect. Rather than using speed line like manga, I changed to something more animation/video games instead. The after images effect proves to be as hard to use as the spiking one if not harder. Thus, I usually reserved these two effects for faster animations only.

Comment: This is some extra sauce I have been using here and there for a while but never categorize it properly. The idea of drawing extra bits that only appear just for milliseconds might be sounds overkill (then again I am crazy lol.) The result of these  little bits could be significant if using it with a suitable timing.

Comment: Alas, the particles. You have seen this effect since the dawn of Skello time. I may have mentioned times before that I got the idea of this effect from the hit spark effects in fighting games (it is one of the most effective way to indicate a hit.)

The final result: this is the result of all effects combined. All the 8 animations running in the background to form one impactful loop animation.

And yet... this is still not counting the script and other animations + effects lol.

The final cut

1. The normal loop (25 fps.)

2. The climax (25 fps.)

Conclusion

All in all, I didn't expect this to be a very formal "How to guide" for that could be found easily on the internet. My intention here is to elaborate what I did that not a lot of others seem to not paying much attention to it.

That being said, the path of doing animation using L2D is vastly different from model rigging / interactive objects. I personally think doing this kind of animation is a bit easier than the rest. The most you have to pay attention is how to implement and organize the aspects into animation loops.

As words are ineffective to deliver the idea of what I am doing, I encourage you to at least download the source files and playing around with the live2d *.can3 and *.cmo3 files. Dragging the parameter around, pick this drop that should visualize it much more than my words.

Downloads

MediaFire 

MEGA 

GoogleDrive  

That's it for the (not) guide, I hope you could take something from it, informatively or entertainment are good enough for me.

As the real Elphelt Valentine project, the set release date is somewhere late in January, for it will be a pretty big one. I will try to update scenes here and there.

As always, I am deeply appreciated of every single supports that I have. Not only it supported my living cost but also a reassurance to my wildest dream, recognized by my beloved audiences.

Thank you, and have a nice day!