"Ciri & Triss - Bedtime training". Reflections + most important info in the first 3 lines.

Greetings.

I want to continue creating longer animations, but I've noticed the gaps between them are too long. Between longer ones, we'll have shorter ones, which will be selected by you.

Soon, there'll be a poll about the next short animation. If you have any suggestions for a theme, direction, something you'd like to see - now it's the best time to share it, so I can potentially put it on the poll. You can do it here or on X, publicly or privately. If you have something, but think it's weird and unsure, just remember - you miss 100% shots you don't take.

Now I'll be talking about the project for the rest of the post.
UPD from the future. I've finished writing all of this, and let me tell you, Patreon has the worst formatting tools I've seen in my entire life. Nothing works, everything breaks, stupid margins and line breaks everywhere. Why can't we just have markdown instead of this crap?

Story time.

Yeeeea, about that. So, I think it's a good idea to go back in time just a bit, to better understand the context.

The first thing I made was "Awakening I". Though the animation quality was below average, it didn't matter since nobody saw it anyway. Then I made 2 versions of "Ciri - Solo" aaaaaaand.... and nobody saw them.

Plants vs Zombies.

The idea for this one actually comes straight from the game. There is a night level where the light constantly goes off. You can't see anything but you can still hear it.
An ideal environment to blend multiple clips together organically and still keep some kind of a story.



Wow, would you look at that. The only thing better is the game itself.

Initial concept and scope creep.

At first, there would be just 4 simple shots, each following a simple lightning strike to reveal itself and making a sequence. That was the whole thing, that's it. I happily said it was going to be finished quickly, at the weekend... BIG MISTAKE. Never tell the date.

Ooh, and a STATIC camera with a bed in the center. Camera should stay in one place the whole time, no reposition, zooms and so on. It was suppose to act as a passive actor, showing progression through the night.

I made 3 out of 4 and realized, that they don't fucking blend the way I thought they would be. They were bland and boring, the ending (4 clip) was suppose to be them just laying on the bed, which didn't work at all. I was already past the deadline, so I might just make the most out of it. I tried different lighting, added progression through the night and decided to change the ending clip to something more meaningful and spicy.

Day versions of the clips. I am thinking about going through them and releasing them as well.

All the extra changes I made to salvage the initial concept ended up expanding the animation so much that I missed the second deadline. And you know what? The worst thing you can do after missing 2 deadlines is to release a total shit. At this point I was feeling a bit like a retard for these delays, but I was determined to do anything to try to solve the mess of the initial concept.

Let's go shot by shot.

Shot 1.

Very nice camera position, almost no physics and easy to animate, nothing really to talk about. On X there is a compositor progression of the shot. There's that.

Shot 2.

This is where the concept started to show cracks. I wanted to show more details, but that would mean moving camera closer, which was a no no. Still, it was looking fine even from that far. I could live with that.

Shot3.

This shot suffered the most from the static camera, I almost lost my shit. Camera was so far away you almost couldn't see any details at all, which required this scene to be rendered in 200% of the initial resolution, which stun locked the PC for the next 16 hours. It's loading GPU and RAM so hard you almost can't do anything in parallel. Also, this was the scene which required lots of body parts physics and booba simulations. This usually takes enormous amount of time if you don't want your tits to bounce like 2 rubber balls which are about to pop off.

I think I had about 60 different tried before I found something that was good enough. All 3 of these have problems and can't really be used.

But let me tell you something, I was playing with the camera anyway and found a very interesting angle. I tried it and... I think it's insanely good. I don't want to show it just yet and spoil everything, but this will be an alternative angle I was talking about earlier in a different post.



Also, the bed looked kinda dead, but it was too late to do anything about it.

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Shot 4.
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So, this one was interesting. It wasn't planned initially, but I felt I really need it. It was harder to animate and the cum sim made it much more time consuming. Since I am not making cum all the time, I needed some time to get back to it. I would say cum itself was 4/10... okay, maybe 5/10. I don't know how to make it more viscous and add dynamic strands between each distant droplets. I tried something with geo nodes but it wasn't good. Also, tons of physics and sims, especially for Triss's tits. Overall a good shot with a nice sunrise, finishing off the night.

This was how it's started:


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Shot 0?
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Even after altering the initial concept and some creating editing, I still wasn't happy with the abrupt start. It was starting from a dialog from the black screen, jumping into the action. Well, that sucked, I decided to spend couple of hours and quickly make an intro.

And you know what? I kid you not, this was me after seeing the first draft.



It was so bad. Okay, I'll show you.



I don't want to hear anything, it's not in the final draft so it doesn't matter. Wow, what is this trash?

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Was this a failed venture?
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Even though the final result was kind of sketchy, I think it was worth it in the end. I mean, there would only be better quality going forward.