Post Anby x Nicole Project Thoughts

Hey everyone, I'm just doing a little reflection about the previous project in this post. If you don't care about long artist ramble thoughts then feel free to ignore this and have a nice day.

So I'm glad to be finally finished with this project. It's a very mixed bag for me personally, I'm gunna cover the ups and downs of this project. What went wrong, where I can improve in the future, and things I learned, etc.

I'll start off with the negatives and end on the good notes. First off I'm pretty annoyed with how long this took me. From start to finish this whole thing took a little over a month, some of that was doing additional model prep and planning, but most of it was animation work. Granted half of it was dialogue and actual character animation. This is something I haven't done in years. The lip sync isn't great, and the actual character animation feels pretty floaty and kinda awkward. It's something I'm out of practice on and definitely need to do more of. There are a few things I can do when planning out these longer animations(namely reference) to help me along the way, but I was sort of brute forcing it, and sometimes this works out fine and other times its a huge struggle. The first dialogue shot with Nicole took me like 3 days to figure out what the hell I was doing with her body while she was talking. There's also some minor ideas that I cut from the final video because fitting them in didn't feel quite right compared to how I had it planned. Going forward I think I'll be able to improve on these things, there's a lot of new things I did in this project, and as everyone should know, your first go around usually isn't going to be spectacular.

So as rough around the edges I think this is, because there were so many new things I tried with this project I can cut myself some slack. If you've been here for a while you know I don't do a whole lot with stylized models like this, so even just from a lighting and shading perspective there's a lot I had to learn. On top of that, I tried messing around with the NLA editor more in depth this time to get a bit more variation in the thighjob animation. This lead to me learning about the quirkness that animation layers and manually editing the nla strips can be. Even for planning the animation I figured out a lot of things that really helped cement my ideas down and get them out of my head, clearing out a lot of mental bandwidth which helps with longer projects like these.

And that's one final point that I'm happy with, even if I'm mixed on the overall project, I'm pretty happy with the fact that I stuck through it. The past few longer projects I've had planned kinda fell through at some point. Most are in a state that I could pick them back up if I ever want to, but unlike those, I was able to push this one through to completion. Even on days I really didn't want to work on this and thought about giving up, I found a few techniques to help me push through that mental block and keep working. Granted some days I did take off and work on something else, but I think that's completely fine as long as I'm able to get back into the main project quickly, which I did.

Anyway as I said before, with this taking so long, I do wanna take a little break from the longer animations and just do some simple stuff like before. At least a few before hoping back to a long project. I think for the next long project I want to recreate a scene from an older hentai I enjoyed and add some personal flair to it. This will be an experiment of just being able to work with a direction already figured out, and finding out ways that I can push elements of it. With the decision of things like camera angles and core timing figured out, I'm just curious if I can recreate it but a little better. I'll share more details on that when I get there. Until then a small animation or two will have to suffice.

Alright, enough typing, if you made it this far, thanks for listening to my rambling. I appreciate each and every one of you and your support. I'm excited to get started working on the next project, and hope to see you all again very soon. Take care and have a good weekend!