13_Hibiki-mssnry Preview (Patreon)

Animation #13

It is a cheerleader's duty to... get your blood pumpin'? Or something like that.

I just made a Twitter account for this page (https://twitter.com/SugardustH). I will upload some of the videos here over there every now and then (complete videos), along with other things I wanna share (NSFW screenshots that I can't post here). Probably going to be behind-the-scenes screenshots or updates, and would be the best place to leave your thoughts or comments if you wanna reach me.

Anyway, apart from improving motion over #11 (Noelle-mssnry), I also overcame a bunch of nasty glitches I've had on the studio. You might not be interested in this so TLDR: "technical difficulties, did workarounds. Oh, also see Twitter for NSFW wip preview of #14."

First, one, there are 'prebuilt'(?) maps that I have no or very limited control over lighting of besides the light on a character which can make background objects (including the map) distracting. This was actually a problem here with this release and scene #13 (Hibiki-mssnry). In the picture above, I tried to 'fix' the bright background issue by using a filter with Reshade that I believe uses the depth mask to turn things grey the further away they are from the focused object or actor(s). The .gif below demonstrates moving the focus away from a certain point (the actor in this case) and greying Su-chan out the further away she is.

Two, this was the first time I used the 'Time Scale' on the Timeline. I realised now that I can just have the animations play at half the speed so I could speed them back up to realtime on the video editor. This serves two purpose: a. it alleviates that issue of the BetterPen dong becoming unstable at lower framerates, and made worse by an actor's fast movement, which causes it to clip out of the... hole; b. I no longer have to worry about going below 60 fps since it's recording at half the speed but still being able to output a 60fps video.

Three, certain tiny areas of the lower body around the groin area were completely missing. These were tiny, probably a couple of dozen pixels that were see-through on multiple areas in certain angles. This was probably a result of bone rotations and the 'part' not modeled(?) enough to cover the more extreme angles. I tried a few things to no avail, so instead I used a plugin on Adobe Premiere to target those areas and replace those darker colors with ones that match the skin. Our viewers probably won't notice this in the video, because it did do a great job - however I still need to experiment on this. With this problem, I have already became aware of being able to scale, rotate and adjust the position of those areas (bones) although I may just work on minimizing using them instead.

Lastly, I know the sounds I use are becoming repetitive so I finally had the chance to use Adobe Audition this year. I went ahead and 'tweaked' my favourite sound files so I could re-use them without them all sounding the same. In this video, majority of the slapping sounds were only using two audio files but tweaked, with a couple extra sound files lightly thrown into the mix - so let me know if it sounds worse. Regarding audio, once I get the time I will try to work out a new workflow to be able to sync the mouth and audio. Truth be told it'd be easier to hire someone to voiceact the animation instead.

Phew, these are pretty important things to learn early on and it's all thanks to you Hibiki. Speaking of, this character card is created by MSY (https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/101555040).

#14 (wip) just wholesome fireworks moment with a certain pyrotechnician (second screenshot is too NSFW for a public post, see Twitter post here)