Bonus content: Animation! Emi walking tests (Patreon)

Welp, this is it! (download the attachment and play it, it should run on regular windows media play or its apple counterpart, but if it's giving you problems try a player like VLC, which basically can play almost any video file you throw at it)

I finally bit the bullet and tried rendering some animation.

And... it wasn't as awful as I thought.

Mind you, this was made using a walk loop I tweaked a little bit (which basically is what helped me get this test done in time, since actually making the animation generally takes WAY longer than just slapping on a preset).

So, I dusted off after effects and put this thing together. Editing is obviously not very fancy (I haven't touched editing software in 3-4 years, so bear with me).

Overall, I think the result is decent. Could obviously be much better, but I think it's a start and - when time allows - could lead to mixing in more animated clips into production, maybe to illustrate a specific scene or something.

Also, as I worked on this, it got me thinking. And I think my New Year's resolutions are as follows:

- Aiming to include animated sequences into the workflow, at least once every couple of months (or more if possible!)

- Further improving hardware. This basically ties in to everything I do, but renderig animation is a good example. This clip was done at a (rather rough) 720p resolution. Rendering all the frames and different camera angles totalled up to a bit over 43 hours, with around another 20 hours thrown into tweaking the actual animation/camera work/editing in after effects. While a lot of work is put into actually crafting a half decent animation, render times are still the biggest hurdle, so improving hardware will definitely help slash those times and help improve final output resolution.

- Begin learning 3ds max. Now this is something of a personal challenge that I want to start delving into. As my work has progressed, I'm definitely starting to feel the limitations of the current software I work with, and I find myself either resorting to smaller suites like marvelous designer and such to try to cope with those limitations. So with that in mind, I think it's time to really ramp things up and get acquainted with an industry standard. Additional bonuses here would be soft body physics (because boobs), better clothing dynamics, as well as potentially being able to worked at a much higher polygon count (in other words, working much more detail into the girls).

So, we'll see how I can mix this self-instruction into my current workflow. It probably won't yield results right away, but this is something more long term I want to do in order to really take the work to new heights :)

Meanwhile, hope you like this little test, and that it gives a taste of what more fun can come along the way!

So, with all that being said, I hope you all have a Happy New Year, be safe tonight. See you all next year ;)

- bd