Updates + My Thoughts On This Year's Animations (Patreon)

Hey folks!

Hope you've been enjoying the holidays! I've been working away on Fawn's fourth episode of Is This Yours?, while taking some breaks to play games and just chill out. I'm still on target to finish her animation before the month ends, as I'm about to start on the final scene, so the end is in sight! I hope...

Looking at the poll I posted about this year's animations,  Uzaki Hana's D.A.M.N. 2 was the most popular, which isn't surprising considering it features two characters XD. The least popular was Rihanne's Envy, which isn't too surprising either, considering how long it took me to make and the problems surrounding its creation.

Which animation was my particular favourite? In terms of being proud with how it came out, I'm pretty happy with both Uzaki Hana's and Yor's Normal animations (ie the public parts). Feeding noodles to Hana was very fun to make, for something I only thought of at the last moment, and came out much cuter than I anticipated. Simple game, but not hard or annoying to play, IMO. Yor's design was very complicated, but I liked how "cinematic" her first animation was. I also enjoyed Annie's animation in the museum, and her eldritch hair stealing the artefact and replacing it with another "artefect". The silly scenes are always fun to make XD

That said, I'm generally happy with everything I made this year, although I can have different reasons for why I'm more fond of one animation than another. My main regret is just how long it takes me to make the bloody things nowadays. Welp. It is what it is. There's no tutorial for the kind of stuff I make, so I have to hope my brain thinks of something that works with the ideas that win the story polls. It's a fun challenge, but a challenge nonetheless.

Here's some more detailed thoughts on each animation:

Uzaki Tsuki: As you may have noticed over the years, I prefer the "mature / milf" characters, so I was not troubled at all when she won the poll.  I remember the biggest difficulty with Tsuki being that she barely appears in the anime, which meant I had few sound clips to work with, and the few clips that she did have were ruined with background music. Still, big booba. The belly expansion from below scene, with her boobs barely fitting in her bra? Quite nice.

When creating the art assets, the face is always the most time consuming part, so having a character like Tsuki, who rarely opens her eyes and has few facial features, was a welcome change of pace. I was and still am pretty happy with how her mirror scene in the Deluxe came out, as well as her final shower scene and the dynamic expansions you could trigger. Having a character be able to move, while also having different expansions that work independently of each other is a huge challenge, but satisfying when it's finished and works as intended. Even if it causes a huge amount of lag. >_>

Additionally, after reading the comic, there's a scene where her husband asks her if she wants a fourth kid, and she doesn't immediately say no. I wouldn't be surprised if she ends up having another at some point in the future. Personally speaking, Tsuki's constant misunderstandings as to Shinichi's intentions were the funniest parts of the comic. Definitely lots of potential there for animation scenarios...

Annie: Despite starting the year with a hefty chest like Tsuki's, the next pin-up winner, Annie (a patron's OC), immediately outdid her with her sizeable screen "presence". As always, the struggle with Annie is fitting her into frame because her chest eclipses everything else. And that's before any expansion happens...

Still, Annie is fun to work with. Her eldritch tentacle hair make writing out her stories incredibly easy, as any problem in the plot can be solved with "the tentacles did it". Stealing things from museums, immediately figuring out how ancient artefacts works, helping to deliver babies...as far as hair goes, they're rather talented. The "sentient hair" thing caused a lot of confusion with patrons new to Annie, but I suppose sentient hair is not that common. 

The animations themselves were fairly complicated, especially when it came to making the Deluxes. Figuring out how to start "small", when you have a character as busty as Annie, was quite a task. Still, the angles and overall growth came out great, although I did have to split the Deluxes into multiple parts just for them to work XD. The final Annie size was a particular challenge to fit on screen (you can barely see her head!) And despite how big Annie was at the end, I still got a message from someone saying they were disappointed at how "small" she was. Some people are never happy, huh?

Still, considering her "unknown" status compared to characters from major comic / animation properties, it's nice to see how popular Annie is, both with my audience and the internet in general (her videos do VERY well on YouTube. I wonder if the boobs filling up the entire thumbnail have anything to do with that?)

Rihanne: Out of all the animations this year, Rihanne's definitely took the longest to make and were most difficult to finish and post. Understandably, a lot of people were disappointed or let down with the results of this animation, as what looked like a very simple game (walk left or right, click on a sunbather to absorb their butt / belly / boobs) belies how much work went into it. 

But after a lot of problems I had encountered with making both Annie's and Tsuki's animations, and problems I have with my software / the HTML5 format in general, I knew it was time to finally figure out how to do more code-based stuff, otherwise I'd be in hell every time I tried to animate anything in the future.

I'll save you the boring parts, but basically figuring out all the code aspects heavily reduced how many layers / frames each animated scene requires, and thus reduced lag generated per scene, as well as making each scene much easier to animate and tweak. Instead of having to tweak fifteen or more layers, now I rarely need to tweak more than three. Instead of a timeline over a thousand frames long (?!), now I don't even need them sometimes. Etcetera. Sounds boring, but it's saved me from hours of pain and frustration.

I'm surprised I didn't burn out with my old system. Compared to the new way of doing things, the old way feels like torture now XD But while it was pain to work on this animation, and I began to panic with how long it was taking me to make the damn thing (3-4 weeks for Deluxe 1, I think?!), the stuff I learned was invaluable. Maybe you don't notice anything different, but on my end, it's made my life a whole lot easier. And now that I've figured out the coding stuff, maybe next year I'll be able to make more animations than I did this year XD

So I could have made Rihanne's animations better (mainly her Normal & Deluxe 1 files, as Deluxe 2 came out pretty nicely IMO), I'm fairly happy with what I learned with this project. Hopefully, I will never take this long to finish an animation project again!

Okay, that's a lot more words than I thought this post would be. To save me sending you to sleep, I'll do a "part 2" tomorrow, to cover the final set of animations. If there are any details you'd like me to expand (ahem) upon that I didn't mention up above, let me know in the comments / via DM.

Otherwise, see you tomorrow for more words. TTFN!