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Progress Report - April 2, 2024
🕑 Added 2024-04-02 23:35:27 +0000 UTCHello, everyone.
Sorry for the delay on the report. I wanted to post this week's Progress Report with the above picture, but with the normals fixed. There's a story there, but the end result is I failed. That's a running theme for this post.
Before we get into that though, here's this week's Squirrel Report.
Let's talk about Monday's note.
As it says, I built an animation and then scrapped it. Got about a minute's worth of animation done, entirely new pose and motion. Was quite pleased with it, really. Here's what it looks like.
You won't see this animation in the final video. Shame, innit?
Reason why is because, as you may recall, a few weeks back I had to scrap another animation and build an entirely new pose, because the original animation didn't allow for a good view of Mercy thumbing Sombra's ass.
In the original draft of this sequence, Mercy fucked Sombra and thumbed her ass in that old position, which is very similar to this one (a general flatiron position). After she brought Sombra to orgasm a second time, she would continue slowly fucking Sombra, before seamlessly shifting to anal in this same position.
The entire anal sequence is built around evolving from this flatiron position into a final face-down-ass-up position, so it's pretty critical that the anal sequence is done in flatiron. In the original draft, that was a non-issue, because the previous sequence ended in flatiron.
However, you may recall that the position I changed to, after the original flatiron failed to work visually, is a more doggystyle position. And 9 out of 10 experts agree, doggystyle isn't flatiron. In fact, in this particular example, not only does it require a complete position change, but it requires a 90-degree shift as well - from Sombra resting against the back of the couch, to Sombra laying along its length.
As such, the transition from the changed position to the anal sequence had to be rewritten as well. It couldn't be a smooth, seamless transition as was originally planned. Instead, I ended up having a frustrated Mercy pull out as Sombra notes how she's came twice now and Mercy hasn't so much as leaked a drop of pre-cum. Sombra then suggests they see if anal can get Mercy "unstuck".
I'm actually quite chuffed with how this turned out. The animation of Mercy throbbing wildly as she squeezes the head of her gock in frustration came out quite nicely, and you get some truly glorious views such as this.
This now leads into the scrapped pre-anal sequence. I tried to follow my original draft, of them starting out with those long slow strokes that were originally Mercy fucking Sombra during her orgasm, which yielded the animation shown above.
However, because Sombra's orgasm has not only already finished, but Sombra's now suggested they move to anal, the sequence just felt out of place. Why are they going back to vaginal, if the impetus for their position change was anal? I threw in some dialogue using Sombra's wet pussy as a lubricator ahead of anal, but then I figured that since I've written Mercy as being stuck and frustrated, she'd just want to slam the shit out of Sombra in a desperate bid to blow her load.
So I wrote Mercy saying as such, and Sombra making some comment about enjoying the moment or something, and it's about this time where I realized I was a minute into this overly-long transition and the pacing was just completely murdered.
I then just consequently deleted the pre-anal animation and all of this exchange. Instead, we're just going to go straight into the anal, which opens with Mercy probing and slipping just the tip in, eliciting a struggle-squeal from Sombra due to Mercy's size before encouraging Mercy to continue - she's fully on-board the breeding train at this point, and is impatient for Mercy to pump some kids into her. If anal will get Mercy unstuck and get her pregnant faster, she's fully willing to put up with any discomfort.
Unfortunately, I don't actually have that animation to show you. Which leads nicely into Sunday's note.
As Sunday's note suggests, and as this post's header image shows, I ended up accidentally hyperfixating on building Victoria Chase from Life is Strange on Sunday. The night before, a Patron whose a semi-regular on the Discord and helps me brainstorm projects dropped a total bombshell on me out of the blue, dropping a bundle of documents he'd been working on over the past few weeks, detailing an absolutely fantastic Life is Strange project idea.
Running with the working title of "Whoretex Club", the project brings in the entire Life is Strange female cast, from Alyssa to Victoria, in a beautiful cavalcade of debauchery that leans on the established setting and personalities of the characters. Among various other ideas, it involved Victoria being the "queen bee" of a Vortex Club prostitution ring, elevating Courtney and Taylor from being Victoria's bitches to being Victoria's bitches. The cherry on top for me was the idea of Victoria using the money that her whores raises to throw herself elaborate orgies, in an idyllic display of narcissistic depravity that I think just perfectly encapsulates Victoria's self-centered attitude.
Needless to say, I had a restless night after that bombshell was dropped, and ended up spending all of Sunday taking Victoria from "doesn't even have a working folder" to "completely built with full faceposing, bodymorph, phonemes, blush, and an outift". It was the fastest character build I've done in a long time.
It unfortunately burned all of Sunday though, which pushed all my plans back a day. Throw in how Monday came out, and here we are.
The real kicker though takes us back to the very top of the post: recall that I said I wanted to post the picture with the normals fixed and failed. Let's talk about that now, because it's turning into a right and proper chore in its own right.
Reposting that image for posterity:
Note how the area around Bictoria's butt is really dark and looks bad. That's the normals being broken. That's what I tried to fix.
Now, once upon a time, I had a tool that could do this in 3dsMax. However, several months ago, I reinstalled Windows, and I dumbly forgot to back up my 3dsMax scripts. I was able to get a good chunk of the tools back from a backup on my NAS, but unfortunately the tool to fix the normals wasn't one of them.
I frankly forgot about this detail, because the normals-fixing was baked into my Group Exporter tool. It handled it all automatically. And so for the past few months, I was operating completely unaware of the fact I had lost this functionality. The fact it's never become a problem sooner is frankly a miracle - it helps that the videos I've made since then all involved characters that had been compiled before the Windows reinstall, meaning they still had their fixed normals in-tact.
I'll spare you all the details and just say that I spent the past 4 hours today rewriting that functionality in 3dsmax. It all works, except for the fact it doesn't work. I can't get much less cryptic without getting into the weeds, so I'll just say that it all works correctly in 3dsmax, but the tool I use for actually exporting out the models to be compiled is ignoring the fixed normals.
I've talked to the creator of the tool, explaining how I managed to get it working once and can't get it again, and his only response was "I am amazed you ever got it working - by all means, it shouldn't." Which isn't encouraging.
As such, I am going to probably have to end up writing a tool that will perform arcane rituals of a form most foul indeed, in order to fix the normals. Again, I'll spare the details, and just say this is going to involve me buying a lot of black candles, acquiring a lot of goats' blood, and getting really good at drawing pentagrams.
Tuesday is my chores day, and as I write this post, I am overrunning my "do chores" time. So I probably won't get any more work done today. And I expect that writing this tool to fix the normals will take most of tomorrow to get working.
And unfortunately, it's a tool I really do need. You all see how terrible Victoria's butt looks in the above picture. That won't fly. I need to fix it. Overbreed specifically doesn't need it, but it's a tool I need anyways. I can afford one day spent fixing it, especially since that will save me the weeks of anxiety if I try to ignore it and focus on Overbreed - the fact the normals are broken and I could fix it would be constantly screaming at me in the back of my mind the entire time.
So we're just going to get it done.
Oh, as a final note, here's Symmetra's new outfit.
So yeah. Made decent progress on Overbreed this past week. Wanted to make more. Will make less this week than I want to as well. But that's just the way of the world, innit?
Until next week, everyone!
