WIP 0229 - GODDESS OF LEWDNESS (Patreon)

hey everybody!

TL:DR: This animation is nearly completed, I'll be focusing on prototyping the game for now on. If you're on our Discord server, I left some poll there asking which boobie version looks better

it's been a bit more than a week since the last wip, but there was a huge jump in terms of animation :)

As I mentioned on the previous post, this particular shot will be meant for the menu screen, and to take things further, I decided to take the original pose that Aster did for the idle animation and turned into a walk cycle, this was something I've been looking to try for a very long time and now the time has finally cum!

Everything you see is 2D, which means there's no actual depth, so getting this effect with puppet animation is very tricky and quite hard to accomplish, even more as I decided to animate it at 30fps, to get a very smooth movement, specially as it'll be featured in a game.

Here's some steps it took for the animation to get form:

1. Initial Blocking

These are the basic poses for the feet, which are the ones who leads the movement and therefore defines all the rest of the body's movement

2. Adding more poses to the blocking

Here's the same blocking but with far more poses for the feet and legs, the keyframes still in step mode, which means there are no per-calculated interpolations from AE

3. Initial Refining

Here's what my mentor used to say when you set all the stepping keyframes into auto:
"All the animation has died and it's the animator's job to bring it back to life"
lol he couldn't be more right, the whole movement looks off and the whole movement feels "weightless". For her right arm I was trying to use some automation physics based on her pelvis and torso movement/rotation, but it wasn't working correctly neither looping, so I'd to scrap it

4. Initial polish

Here we're pretty close to the final animation, I fixed her walking distance by spreading her feet further, on the refining they were too close, which would lead her to actually far due the out of the balance movement. Also added some tricky way to make the gun looks like it's 3D haha

5. Final polish

Here the whole movement working, I adjusted her shoulders as they were a bit stiff and also changed the boobies direction. Initially set her boobies to follow her torso rotation, so both of them goes from left to right, which is the right movement, but I felt like having them bouncing in this way, even though isn't natural, looks more, idk, delicious hahaha

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Now the only part left to finish her overall animation is the long hair meshes, which has been quite complicated to get right, I've been experimenting with different hair rigs and I got one that looks more natural, but for the initial setup they made her looks like Medusa, as each mesh was going to some random direction lol

Once it's set, I can start adding the same dynamics for her clothes and the animation will be completed! Of course the process doesn't ends here, as I still need to do composite on the scene, which means, make things prettier by adding light and other special effects to the scene.

As the hair is taking a long time to get right, I might left this aside and working in some free time and focus on the prototyping part, which is by far the most important! The only reason I started this animation instead of the prototype was because I was waiting for the final assets from Aster, which after some (very late) thought, I realized it's not true, because I could just start the prototype with the unfinished assets, as it's just a prototype lol I'm sorry about that.

So for the next update, expect some in-game action, it won't be pretty, but at least it'll be something interactive :)

If you're reading this, it's because you're awesome and really like the stuff I've been posting, and you've my eternal gratitude! 🙇‍♀️

much love, washa ❤️