Checkup Blues: Status update #1

Hello everyone! My next big project, an animation called "Checkup Blues" featuring Linda and an anonymous female doctor, is going to take a lot of time to finish. That's why I thought it would be a good idea to update you monthly or so on it's status, hopefully without giving away too much. If you didn't know about this project already, I urge you to check out this post for the very first sneak preview! My personal goal with this project is to practice storytelling and everyday movements. For you, this means an animation that's way longer than usual and sticks to teasing rather than hardcore content. The "Blues" in the title refers to blue balls, so be warned – this is will be "Locker room Lust" all over again, in true taboomanian style. This is Linda, after all!

So, how much progress has been made since last time? Last month I said that January would be slow due to hectic circumstances, and that things would hopefully ease up by the end. They did, though not very long ago. I got the chance to sit down and finish up all commissions, and after that I started looking at Checkup Blues again. The animation itself has barely grown in terms of length since last time – it has now passed the one minute mark(yay!), which is like three seconds more than previously. This is because those three seconds were a point in the animation that I knew would be challenging for me to animate, and I thought I'd focus on that challenge in this update: 

Moving the doctor from her table and over to Linda.  

Above is an early test render of the setting. In the animation, the doctor is sitting to the left by the desk, while Linda is standing to the right by the room divider. After some introductory shots, the doctor is to move over to Linda to start the examination. 

Doing sex positions is usually fine – I find most animations where characters remain stationary relatively easy. But as a very amateur hobby animator, the real difficult stuff starts whenever I have to actually move the entire character from one point to another. And don't get me started on walking! I am not even close to trying handmade walking animations yet. There are premade walking animations and other miscellaneous everyday movements available for Daz studio that would help me out, and I've seen them in lots of other works by various artists(very smooth stuff), but that would negate my goal with this project – practicing handmade mundane animations. 

I needed some other solution for this part while I was planning the animation. This is why I picked a stool with wheels for the doctor. It allowed me to move her without having to do too complex movements right away, yet still challenging me on a certain level as I tried to make her slide over smoothly. The resulting animation looks like this (animated gif below):

It's just a little bit slowed down to let you look closer at the movements, and the grainy quality is due to it being a quick test render. I'm still polishing certain parts of the movement – such as her right arm stuttering a bit near the end and her breast jiggling perhaps a tad too much when she stops –  but I'm very happy with how it turned out, all things considered! And I feel more confident with large movement arcs now!

So this little shot is what most of my time went into when working with Checkup Blues this past month. I did polish some other existing sequences as well whenever I had a chance, so there's been a slight increase in overall animation quality, though you won't notice since it's stuff I haven't shown yet. Once I'm content with the sliding sequence, things should speed up, as the following sequences are way easier to animate. 

Final words

There's a lot going on for me as I prepare for the upcoming overhaul of the tiers and commissions reward. Check the bottom of this post if you don't know what I'm talking about. I'm saying "tiers" too because there will be a little touchup to the tiers as I do the changes. It's just cosmetic stuff and a lot of new text, but it does require a ton of work on my end, so it feels like an overhaul to me. Stuff will look prettier, and you'll be seeing some new elements based on your tier. But I'll get back to that in my official announcement, which will be posted this sunday according to the roadmap I've set up for myself.  

Naturally, the decision to make these changes has slowed progression on Checkup Blues again, though for the better in the long run. As commissions take a back seat and allow for more focus on mini sets and personal projects, my capacity to work on the animation should be boosted in the coming months. I'm also doing some experimenting to ease my workflow for animating, so hopefully that too will come into play soon. I'm learning a lot these days! 

See you all soon!