61_CeresFauna-tasty

Animation #61

[Current Character Queue]
#61 Ceres Fauna (Hololive) [ETA ~January 20]
#62 Hoshimachi Suisei (Hololive) [ETA ~January 30]
#63 Furina (Genshin Impact) [ETA ~February 9]
#64 Hu Tao (Genshin Impact) [ETA ~February 19]
#65 Frieren (Sousou no Frieren) [ETA ~February 29]
#66 ? (?) [ETA ~March]   
#67 ? (?)...

[Worklog]

Man, what a start this year. Holidays end and I was immediately overloaded. I don't think it had any big impact on #61 Fauna's production but man I am a little bit exhausted from life things beyond this Patreon page - just a tiny little bit, lol. 

Thank you to everyone who are supporting this Patreon page because it makes it all worth dealing with the mess of schedules and hitting deadlines through late nights. 

#61's release is another brighter scene than usual. I think I did a little better with lighting in a brighter scene but with a lot, like I mean a lot, of manual character shading changes. I was going through every character hair piece and sometimes manually changing the material shading of objects in the scene. I... don't think this is efficient, and honestly I think it might have something to do with just not placing all of our 5 lights in the correct place. But hey I know I improved and that's what counts... right?

I also wanna figure out how to do fog or at least fake a 'volumetric fog' in some angles. I could see using Coloured Shadows and maybe keyframing their alpha values (maybe even position and scale), and I don't really see a better way to do this. This might also be the only performant way.

Speaking of performance, I also don't think I could've gone several more minutes with the model here 'cause the Timeline was causing some massive frame drops. I believe the character model added to the load 'cause it wasn't as bad as it was on Navia's release since Navia didn't really have that many dynamic bones or extra hair pieces. At least I think it's because of Fauna's extra 'physics load' that is making the scene's Timeline more difficult to work with. It's fine though, it was workable but it did make fine-tuning a little bit more slow to do as I spend time waiting on every change and every 'loading'. 

The slow Timeline eats up time and we'll see how it goes for the next few releases to see if we really would have to introduce an extra plugin to deal with the Timeline performance problem we're having. I am hesitant to suddenly require our Studio users to install additional plugins ontop of the base pack so we'll weigh the pros and cons and see how it goes for maybe the next >5 releases maybe.

Another odd thing we had with this building object were these random flickering black texture that we ended up just hiding with black shadows or image plates. They seem to only flicker when the camera moves and fortunately they aren't as majorly jarring so it might be visible in some angles if we missed any. We didn't really have the time to go through the object's material editor to see which one we had to disable so we just hid them with other objects, lol.

Now that we're done with #61, we do already have some ideas for what we want to do with #62 Suisei through the ideas suggested by our Discord members. I will do what I must 'cause I really wanna get this idea to work.

Until our next release, see ya.