66_RaidenShogun-sweetie + Schedule/Poll Results (Patreon)

Animation #66

The character poll has ended! Here is the updated queue.

[Current Character Queue]
#66 Raiden Shogun (Genshin Impact) [ETA ~March 15]
#67 Asuma Toki (Blue Archive) [ETA ~March 29]
#68 Shirakami Fubuki (hololive) [ETA ~April 9]
#69 Nakiri Ayame (hololive) [ETA ~April 19]
#70 Nerissa Ravencroft (hololive) [ETA ~April 29]
#71 Keqing (Genshin Impact) [ETA ~May 10]
#72 Shiori Novella (hololive) [ETA ~May 20]
#73 ? (?) [ETA ~?]...

Here are the final results:

90 votes - Asuma Toki (Blue Archive)
82 votes - Shirakami Fubuki (hololive)
66 votes - Nakiri Ayame (hololive)
63 votes - Nerissa Ravencroft (hololive)
62 votes - Keqing (Genshin Impact)
57 votes - Shiori Novella (hololive)

The following characters almost made it but votes were not enough to reach the cut-off:

56 votes - IRyS (hololive)
54 votes - Yoimiya (Genshin Impact)
51 votes - Chiori (Genshin Impact)
51 votes - Ookami Mio (hololive)

[Worklog]

It's always a great feeling when you come across obstacles and then instantly knowing the workarounds or solutions 'cause we've faced them before. We don't have complete control over everything and with that many workarounds are made.

It can be as simple as trying to create a squished cheeks look, or as annoying as correcting the pos and rot of a hair accessory piece that is getting in the way or clipping where it shouldn't. I suppose when it comes to a lot of things, just knowing what to do is a massive advantage - 'knowledge is power' or something like that. Pretty sure I've roleplayed and used one of these quotes before.

I've received feedback that recent scenes are too 'dark' and I suppose we could look into brightening them up. I'll work on it, at least to what I can. I am still looking to finding how to achieve that balance of lighting from that one video I've seen before and at this point the only way I know I could get better at this is by trial.

It could be that the position and 'brightness' of the lights are not even the major contributors. It could also just be because the material edits of our characters are wrong and not accommodating to what we want to achieve. It could also just be our ReShade settings are tuned wrong.

We've been at this for over a year now, and I suppose we'll just have to continue trying things out with our lights 'til we find our tune.

If you've noticed, I also have not been releasing 'WIPs' or previews. I'm not sure when we'll start releasing them again, but after that message from X (formerly Twitter) saying something about our posts getting limited due to 'Platform Manipulation' we're not really that motivated. The only thing we post there are WIPs so we don't know.

I suppose that could help us shave time off and not rush things. Generating 'decently looking' WIPs do affect our workflow since that makes us do things early that should be saved for later in the workflow. 

By that we mean you'd normally want to animate the character bodies first and get the general motions down, but by wanting to generate a WIP or preview, we'll have to push forward the 'polish' side of things that include refining what is in the background, placing of shadow objects, tweaking the lights and materials and all that. The problem with rushing this early is that if a later body motion requires moving other objects in the scene around, or if we want to adjust the POV angle or move the characters elsewhere, then the work we've done and time spent for all those things are wasted. 

Okay, it's not like we can't do WIPs or previews - we do want to do WIPs or previews, it's probably just that we have to better plan way ahead to minimize losses like that. We'll continue to improve in this regard, and we will release WIPs or previews as long as time would allow. 

Though, at the end of the day Su-chan makes the call and we either do or we don't, lol, as long as we meet the deadline for video release.

Anyway, too much text we'll see ya next release. o/