Hey Gohan, How's Blender? (SFM to Blender) (Patreon)

Hey everyone, just wanted to talk about experience so far.

TLDR at bottom


Hey Gohan, Why Delay?
 I want to touch on technical aspects/challenges, that took me longer to grasp the hold of. (this is aside from personal stuff, just technical challenges of learning). Differences between how I'd do it on SFM vs now learning it on Blender. Also why Blender so much better than SFM.

Let's get started.

 
 
1. Overhauled Animation System
 

 
In SFM, to animate a character. The data for All bones, procedurals, shape keys are put together in one instance. Mixed in one pot basically. See img below


It's easier to see all the raw data put together in SFM, but once an animation gets close to completion it becomes more and more difficult to edit, because any edit affects the whole pot, not just that one motion anymore.

short example:
If I animate breathing | Then I animate head turn | then I edit breathing again
Editing the breathing at end would also affect the headturn animation that was added in, middle.

 
In Blender, that's not that case.  Take a look at img below.

 This is Blender's Animation System (Animation Management System). 

Every track you see has these rectangle blocks (it's basically its own animation attached to it). So I'm able to mix animations without destroying the final product. which is... Amazing to say the least.

Learning this system took some time due to some operations. This isn't tutorial but here's basic idea of mixing animations.

Ignore most, the ones I use are
Replace: replaced current animation with new one
Add: Adds into current animation (Basically this is how to do small edit on animation)

This is a game changer for me.
But it takes a lot more time to setup. If SFM is Play blocks, Blender is Legos.

But once an animation is done, I can save it, protect it. Which leads into my next point!

2. Pose Libraries!


I can finally build, I can finally build my own library of poses and animations!

 I hope to have a very strong library of character poses and animations to speedup my animation. However I just need the time to build them completely. So right now the snowball is small and I need to get it rolling down the mountain.

In SFM I had to redo redundant animations from scratch. Every. Single. One.


This next point is probably going to be the one negative of Blender. As everything else was just me learning the systems.

 
 
 
 3. Slow Playback Times
  

 


 So SFM was easier for playback (Seeing my own animation) since it's a low polygon software.

This is probably the biggest technical reason it took so long for animation, since if I wanted to view my animation I, would render them and view img sequence on video editing software. Which took a long time.

I have over 100gb of just renders for playback.



And each camera angle having over 10 shots cause I suck at getting it right the first time





So does that mean my animations are going to take longer now? Initially yes, but the way to mitigate is 2 ways.

The slow playback is due to the scenes being really heavy.
There's an addon that can make blender go faster but it comes at the cost of disabling key elements of the scene, for example thigh jiggle, or clothing.

The best way to do it, that I will try to implement in my workflow is doing animations in separate files and then bringing them into one scene after it's all complete.

I always do all my animation in one scene but the drawback is slow playback, So if I do my animations in separate files and bring them to one master file at the end, it would help with playback of each animation but from a storyboarding perspective it'd be hard to see the end product early on. The setup would be heavy as well, but I'm going to try with next project.



4. Gohan are you okay? (Personal issues?)

  So I usually take my personal problems on the chin and roll with it. That's just the occurrence of life. The problems that happening now just took way more time away than I was okay with and I promise you I was dreading the time being wasted. This problem I hope goes away very soon, but . The problem isn't a go fix it problem, it's a shut up and wait for the waves to ride over problem. So I'm adapting to waves and getting back on the track.



Thank you for reading.



TLDR:
Techincal Challenges from SFM to Blender
1. Overhauled Animation System
2. Pose Library and Animation Library Building
3. Slow Playback
4. Gohan is okay


Also will be making post of winner tomorrow (lol) but the winner is Sakura.

See you soon folks