Progress Report - Radio Silence - Week 2 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone! Another Thursday passes, another progress report gets posted!

I decided to do something a bit more technical for this week's progress report.  

EDIT: I originally mentioned making a different infographic, with more accurate measurements. It turned out the new metric yields almost identical numbers, so I am not going to remake the infographic. The overall progress yield with new metrics is 36%.

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So, with that being said, let's talk details about progress. This is gonna be a long post, so make some popcorn, get out your Snuggie, turn off the lights, and settle in.

In a nutshell, I am about 5 days farther behind than where I should be.  The reason for this is a long and rather embarrassing road. And it all begins with the screenplay...

The screenplay, as I posted it some weeks ago, calls for Jill having her body racked about with a very passionate loving from her Fun Friends(TM). It also calls for her being stuffed airtight.

Well, I addressed the problems with this in last week's progress report. But that isn't the end of this story. Oh no. Far from.

With the new pose came changes to the screenplay. Most notably, I needed to transition Jill from the body-racking position to the Maximum Overstuffing(TM) position. That's done with a cut-away to Chris. That's easy.

Then came the tragedy of this story: animating the Maximum Overstuffing(TM) position. At first, I tried animating it in SFM. It came out so terribly I didn't even bother posting WIPs of it on the Discord, and just instantly nuked the animation and stopped working for that night in an attempt to forget.

So then the obvious solution came to me: animate the Fun Friends(TM) in 3dsMax, taking advantage of its spline IK solvers for that lovely serpentine motion in the wide-shots. And with that obvious solution came a less-intuitive solution: animate Jill's body motions in SFM, and then export them into 3dsMax to animate the Fun Friends(TM) around her.

The problem is that 3dsMax has no tools to import SFM-exported animations. And so I set out to make my own. And I spent FOUR. DAYS. On it. In total, over 50 hours. And the end result? Garbage. For technical reasons I don't want to get into, it didn't work correctly. It was 4 days of wasted time and effort.

Not one to be deterred, I just decided to recreate Jill's pose in 3dsMax, using forward kinematics (because I haven't figured out how to get 3dsMax's arm-leg IKs to work correctly yet). It took about 45 minutes, but I got her pose done. Only to find out that 3dsMax butchered her skeleton, making her impossible to animate. So I had to remake the pose from scratch.

Then came time to add the Fun Friends(TM). I doctored one up to work correctly, re-importing all the flexes, resizing it, and what-not. That took about 45 minutes. Then I got it into the scene, rigged it up with IK handles, and posed it into position. That took an agonizing 90 minutes.

Then I added the second Fun Friend(TM), which needed no doctoring (already done). Rigged it up with IK handles, and posed it. Another 90 minutes. Great! Now, turn them both on to see. Aaaaaaand...

The IK on the first one broke. The Fun Friend had reverted back to its initial pose. Another 90 minutes wasted.

In total, I probably wasted about 4 hours in 3dsMax, before I just decided it wasn't going to work.

At this point, I was really low. And I mean really low. Probably the lowest I have been in years. My obstinate stubbornness had failed me. I had lost. I was talking about cancelling the Jill short, cancelling Hiveship (which was announced 3 years ago as a Fun Friend(TM) orgy of delight), deleting my Tumblr, shutting down this here Patreon, and just overall curling up into a ball and crying.

And then, in the midst of my unequivocal sorrow, a weak shining light caught my attention, one final flickering glimmer of hope, born of desperation. And it proved to be my salvation.

This light presented to me a fundamental change in my methodology with this pose. It set out a few ground rules, in order of precedence:

• 1.) Minimize the amount of Fun Friends shown in contact with Jill.
  
• 2.) Maximize the amount of Jill shown on screen.
  
• 3.) Simplify the Fun Friends' pose and motions. So little of them will be seen that, like the curvature of the Earth from our perspective, their motion will seem linear, like the Earth seems flat. Keep it Simple, Stupid. Don't get artsy when 95% of it won't ever be seen.
  
• 4.) Use a single-stroke motion with 90* phase differences, rather than a quadruple-stroke motion that's wholly in phase. Without going into detail, single-stroke just means the body moves once per penetration single. Quadruple-stroke meant each Fun Friend(TM) made her body bounce, whereas single-stroke means that her body only bounces once for every 4 penetrations.
  
• 5.) Cheese the fuck out of the animation. Lock Fun Friend(TM) bones that are off-screen. Only animate the bits that are explicitly shown. Animate the re-emergents (where the Fun Friend goes from off-screen to on-screen, but not visibly in contact with Jill) separately. Cheese their motion to look like it's all moving as one, when in reality, they're not. This means having to tune the animation for every camera angle, but it only means having to move on average 40 bones per shot, as opposed to 256 bones per shot. And it means that it avoids the snowballing jitter effect that animating long chains of bones can cause, so it ends up looking better.
  
• 6.) Frame the camera angles such that all camera motion will be a subset of the initial position, EG the camera will never show off more than the initial position. This is to ensure that any animation made for a given shot will always look right, no matter what the camera does.

With those new rules in mind, the animation flourished. In the span of two days plus a few hours, I managed to get 8 of the 11 shots of the new pose completely animated, including some complex non-loop motions and transitions.

The way things are going, I am expecting that I might actually finish up the sex scene tomorrow. 

So, after 5 days of spinning my wheels and spiraling into a pit of despair, a simple paradigm shift as to how I pose, frame, and animate the scene proved to be my salvation. And in the end, we are on track for an April 30 release.

That is where things are now. It's been one hell of a stressful week for me. I'm glad my hair is already thinning, because otherwise people would have awkward questions about where all my hair went, and I'd have to beat around telling them I've been pulling it out.

BUT, it's ended on a phenomenally high note. Things are looking good, moving forward.

I only now realized I was supposed to post a new text this last Sunday. I will see what I can scrounge up for this Sunday. Like I said, it's been a very stressful week for me. I apologize.

Until then, and then from there, I will see you all next Thursday!

You can find a tease WIP of some of the work I've done in the Discord channel specially made for these things.