Byleth xmas animation (Patreon)

a short animation of byleth in lingerie. includes a revealing version, some stills, and progress renders.

download is attached to the bottom of this post.

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this was supposed to be a quick test animation, but turned out to be a bit more involved. below are some details about the process.

last post i mentioned using a better method for hair creation. it works great for stills, but there's no built in way to give it physics (animation) like the old method has.

to add hair physics, i spent a while trying to learn the heavily wip simulation nodes in blender. turned out to be too complicated for me while also crashing a lot.

i ended up using a variation of this workflow https://blenderartists.org/t/rig-and-simulate-hair-curves-on-blender-3-3/1407111 which also meant i had to redo how my hair nodes were set up.

so far the hair physics look terrible. it'll improve on the next anim.

while rigging i needed to make some changes to the body model, which means the uvs change, which means i need to bake textures from the old model to the new one. this is tedious and time consuming, and the results are never perfect.

i decided to remake the body textures in substance painter, which gets around this issue by saving your brush strokes and reapplying them when you change your model. it's also a better 3d painting experience in general.

downside is having to switch programs, and having less customization in the skin shader.

eventually the animation was done so i rendered it, but there were weird glitches such as eyebrows and lashes changing opacity, random polys being stretched across the scene, and skin phasing through clothing.

i tried debugging the issue by changing a setting in blender, rendering out 10~20 frames, and repeating until the glitches were gone. this took many hours but eventually i learned it was a combination of motion blur and certain meshes having auto smooth enabled.

with that solved i just needed to render out everything again, which took ~26 hours for both versions combined.

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i want to post more often, so i'm going to try working on separate still renders at the same time that i'm working on animation and see if that helps.

i've also been able to dedicate more time to this recently because of the support you're giving me here, thank you.