First look at Kayla's WIP animation variant!

Alright, animation update finally! Time to show off Kayla a little bit and tell you what we've been working on. The renders above are done in Marmoset, the texture work was done in Zbrush. Nothing is final and I can already tell you some things we're going to be tweaking a little bit, but first the backstory.

So, what has been my hangup about animation all these years? Mainly that I'm not a very technical guy. I'm a visual guy. I love rendering. Which is fine, that's a discipline in itself. But the reason being a technical guy would've come in useful is the fact that Daz Studio uses a lot of proprietary systems that you need to find solutions for when you export these characters into other software. 

Daz itself does offer a lot of bridging plugins between Studio and say Maya or Blender or Unreal Engine, but includes with them a very annoying limitation: you can't use third party geografts, only authorized Daz Studio ones! Since geografts are the only way I can let these ladies have nipples, dicks, pussies etc, you sorta start to understand what this limitation really means; it's to prevent the export of NSFW-oriented characters.

So, in order to animate in outside of Daz Studio (which is the only viable way to animate, Daz is really not suited for it) what I need is a unified mesh that includes all sexual and non-sexual geo on the same mesh (or layer, if you would), with a unified texture set that doesn't look like it has gaps or seams. 

Most practically, this means I would re-use Kayla's body textures but anything that involves sexual geo would require textures remade from the ground up since in Daz these things get blended together with all sorts of transparency maps on separate physical layers. And I just don't have experience texturing, and certainly I never thought that whatever I could teach myself in between set production would be high enough quality to where I'd want to feature it in final renders.

As you can see in the included images, the texture work is being taken care of. A buddy of mine is doing it for me. We're almost done, too! Clearly the tip of the dick is too purple, but otherwise it all pretty much matches with how you've seen Kayla in sets like ONS or more recently, her biography.

We've also done some minor sculpting on her body. Her breasts are a bit more perfectly round, her dick has a more custom shape, her hips/waist have a more natural curvature. The vein on the top of the dick is a bit too much and in the next iteration you'll see less of it.

So what's there to do after this? I'll have to provide her with a rig, which is what allows me to actually animate her. This is the part I think I'm doing myself, but I'm also still open to the idea of outsourcing this to someone experienced. So if you do rigging, or you know someone who does, get in touch with me and give me an idea of what a quality rig would cost me. I'm still not decided either way, the idea of learning it myself does seem fun especially if I can make Patreon content out of it, but there's also something to be said for being done with it sooner rather than later.

Big wall of text, but there it is!

Hope that filled you guys in. I know I've spoken about animation many times before throughout the years and I understand of some of you are doubtful I'll ever do it :P To be honest, a part of me is too lol. But I am insistent on moving forward with this step by step. Don't think of the whole project, just think of the next thing to do. That way, eventually, we should end up in a good spot.