Amy Beach Makeout (Patreon)

This week is really hectic, man. A LOT of different events, planning, tasks, and projects happening in close succession. Amidst it all, I'm scrambling to get this beach stuff done.

The above gif was a huge fuckin pain in the ass, but I finally got it to a place where I'm relatively pleased with it.

I'm putting a lot of love into this Amy scene, and in general I'm feeling good about a lot of the stuff I did this month for the beach update. Right now I'm debating if the above animation is "enough" as a payoff for this scene before eventually transitioning into Amy's sex scene, or if I have a little more in me to make this scene a little more awesome 😅. Probably the latter.

There are a lot of motions I wanted/want to do better. The hand is obviously the main thing, and there's this problem I run into sometimes with animations, where I'm trying to get super fluid hand or body motions that "carry through." I pulled this off quite nicely with the recent Samantha commission, but I'm failing to do it here and it's driving me crazy.

Edit: Huge yet obvious breakthrough on this front. It randomly occurred to me that perhaps the slight "pause" or "bump" the arm does at key points was because all three keyframes for the bicep, forearm, and wrist bones were aligned on the same frame. If that slight sense of roboticism was staggered, perhaps it would feel more organic.
AND I WAS FUCKING RIGHT. The above gif's hand motion is now fluid.
So NOTE TO SELF: Next time you have this problem, try grabbing the keyframes and offset each of them slightly.

For reference:

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The kissing is another thing I really would love to do better, but damn is it difficult. I want their jaws working, their lips pressing and their faces pushing into each other, but it's challenging enough getting one still frame to look good (the way the mouths press together leads to a lot of clipping, which fucks up the curves and ends up looking bad without a lot of polish). Animations are a different ball game.
Regardless, it's one of those things that's important to me, so I will continue to chase it even if I can't figure it out for this animation.

Sorry about the lack of posts lately, it's part of why I felt so determined to make this post even if the gif isn't quite done yet.

I will not give a release date yet but goddamn, let's get to a fuckin light at the end of the tunnel in June, please!

Till then, enjoy ~💕🎶