Kuchi donut animation test - wip1 (Patreon)

Note: this is just an experiment! It may never get 'finished', but I'm sharing the process of it anyway.

So! I made a mention of wanting to do more experimentation this month in my update post, possibly some rough animation... Well, here's exactly that! Only a mere 4 seconds so far and not anything fancy, but it's only a starting point, a proof of concept. Maybe I'll keep adding onto it, and see if rendering it into an actual animation is something viable for me. Or maybe I'll take what I learn from this and make something simpler, some small loop of something. I'm not sure yet! But that's kinda the goal, to just wing it and experiment.

I do have some further ideas for this, vaguely. Something with Kuchi actually using that tongue of hers, maybe a tiny 'friend' in the scene if that's not wholly too difficult to add (it is a whole second figure to pose, if I do add one). I'm also not sure how much I can do, since DAZ Studio has some pretty decent animation tools but they're only that: Decent. They work. Probably needs plugins to be properly usable, but I'll save that for after I figure out what exactly I'm doing here.

As for those 4 seconds though, I'm pretty happy with them! This is already a few days of fiddling, but I do think it was well spent; the main thing I was trying to do is have her take a bite from the donut, which I think has worked wonderfully (there's two donut models, one with and one without a bite, and the scene swaps the latter out at just the right moment). Movement is unexpectedly easy to do, same with expressions and such. Just... the hard parts are more to do with animation knowledge on how to do timing, how to make motion look natural, stuff like that. But gotta start somewhere!

I don't know how far along I'll get with this experiment, but I'll at least be sure to share whatever it does turn into, whether that's a longer rough sequence or something more finished. For now, it's about having fun and learning new things this month. :D

edit: dunno if it's just me that can't get the video to work embedded, but if you get any errors with it, try this link instead! https://youtube.com/shorts/pFKEJTz3Ek4?feature=share