Melody x Lawa - Welcome To The Show! ❤️(˵^ ◡ ^˵)❤️ - WIP (Patreon)

Hey hey everyone! Hope your week is going awesome! (づ￣ ³￣)づ ❤️

And we are back to our normal animation days with the very first WIP of Melody x Lawa, voiced by Melody herself! ❤️ ٩(๑•̀ω•́๑)۶ ❤️ This one took some time to assemble, but im super proud of what we did there! Being the very first scene in this animation, we tried to test as much new stuff as we can there! Dialogue, lip sync, new lights, new motion style, more complex hair animation, new render settings, etc! I know its all technical, but all my thoughts were with this scene for the last few days, so i really want to share more info about the matter!

Dialogue - we are trying lip sync animation for the very first time, so your feedback is super welcome! The biggest revelation there was, that u need some serious supporting body motion when the character speaks (i know, who would've thought? XD). So the lip sync itself ended up to be less time consuming, then the extra body motions that go along with it. And the story-board for the whole project helps immensely - we already know what she will do and say from start to finish, so it helps big times when organizing voicing work with Melody! Definitely a super fun challenge, and i cant wait to share our results in further shorter dialogue scenes! Hope u'll like it!❤️(˵^ ◡ ^˵)❤️

New motion- we've done some serious upgrades to overall motion design! Back in the day (and maybe still?), our animations were really slow, like these characters are stuck in jello (or was it just Slime-kun? (¬‿¬)❤️). And now, with brand new project and rig for Melody, we are free to try something new! Much snappier motions, combined with some new rig features added by Shuro, allowed us to create a lot of really cool motions, that we havent done before! I feel like i could've overdone it a bit here and there, playing with new controls and timings, so as always - feedback is super welcome! (っˆڡˆς)❤️

Hair animation - its a whole world by itself there. The thing is - we do all the hair and giggle animations manually, without physics. Sometimes physics may have some advantage over our method (and we may switch to it in future for some scenes), but for most of what we do, manual animation proved to be more precise and better controllable (also much easier to preserve a specific hairstyle like that). And with Genshin characters, hair animation was a bit time consuming, but still rather simple, cause the hair itself doesnt have too many loose parts. Melody on the other hand - every separate strand (and there are a lot of them), has its own bone structure, and needs to be animated one by one XD Its like - theres not enough hair to switch to full physics, but there are already a bit too many for manual animation. So long story short - God bless i have Shuro helping with hair motion! Each 10 seconds of hair movement (if the whole head is visible) takes around 6-8 hrs to animate, and he already saved me weeks of time with hair alone! (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ ❤️

New colors and render settings - it gets technical here, and im not 100% understand whats going on there, but i've read quite a few materials on render outputs and color grading, so we ended up trying some new ways of file output for our renders. You as a viewer dont have to worry about it - u will still get png/mp4 files just like before (๑❛ڡ❛๑)👍For us on the other hand...
...we are trying to adopt AgX renders with Medium-High-Contrast-Look, pack it in EXR and move it properly to Davinci Resolve for color grading, and i still cant figure out Medium-High-Contrast-Look translation for Davinci... And dont even get me started with editing EXR in Photoshop...
If you know anything about, please help QQ It will help immensely!

Anyway enough, of technical stuff and lets jump straight back to work! ❤️ ٩(๑•̀ω•́๑)۶ ❤️This scene was probably the most complex and time-consuming in the entire project (both Melody Part1 and Part2), so expect our next WIPs much sooner! Stay tuned, have a most wonderful week, enjoy new Elden and ZZZ releases, and see ya all just in few with more streams, WIPs and releases! (づ￣ ³￣)づ ❤️

Luv u all!!! (っˆڡˆς)❤️❤️❤️

P.S. Check out the attachments for 1080 and 4K versions with sound (｡> ‿ ◕｡)❤️