Heart-shaped boxful of WIPs

Hello! Time for another update on how things are going with the current project, as well as another one I got going that will be worked on while Kata Lux is rendering, more on that below.

Poll Winners, Katarina x Lux

So, Kat Lux has been in the works for a while, huh? I would say it's unusual but it really isn't, I've noticed I tend to be very slow with poll projects even if simple, and I've got my theories on why, like needing to interrupt the work to do the monthly suggestions every month which does mess with the "flow" of the project. However this one suffered from something else on top of that.

So here's the process - Initially I wasn't sure if I was going to make this a big project with dialogue and an intro, so I started making it a big one to see if it was going anywhere. It wasn't really clicking so I trimmed it down to just the meaty stuff. Then partway through I did a Kata model update, so I figured since I wasn't that far in I would try to re-do the project with the new model, but then I remembered I had already made WIPs for the old one and doing a new pose altogether would've felt strange since people would be expecting a mating press. So I went back to the old one using the old model. Then a while later I considered doing dialogue again, but had no clear vision for what they were going to say and since the animation wasn't made with that in mind it would've felt awkward. So I scrapped that, and so on...

There's more that happened but you get the gist, it's a very bumpy project mainly due to a lack of a solid vision for it. I've now settled on what I want to do for it, so it's well underway to being done, but those roadbumps were a bit unnecessary and I'm going to try avoiding those mistakes in the future.

So with that out of the way, the current status of the project is that I'm doing test renders, which are lower quality renders to find clipping issues and various other errors that would mess with the final render. I've tossed a couple of frames from that one above, but note that the test render does not have textures beyond the size of 128x128 so it looks very undetailed and smooth. The final version will look better.

It's coming along well, and I've got the first test render done already, with another one being cooked up soon. I'm aiming to have the animation very close to done by the end of February, with a release perhaps the first or second week of March. But as usual we'll see if any complications occur.

Mercy x D. Va Facial

I did say I was going to do variety animations from other games sometime, right? This one is a commission that I've been working on whenever I need to rest my eyes from Kata Lux. It'll feature some jerking, some head succing/licking and a messy facial ending which is a first time thing for me. The D. Va model is made by ColonelYobo, and the Mercy futa model is combining a couple of Nyl's overwatch models to make a meaty futa mercy that I'm quite fond of.

It's currently in the animation/expressions phase, where I add some cute gestures and expressions to Dva while she sucks and jerks that meaty healing shaft. So it's still got a bit to go before it's done. I expect it to be done sometime after Kata Lux, which should place it somewhere at the end of March or early April, but these are very rough estimations - with some luck it'll be done sooner but it's hard to say this early into the project.

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Anyways, that's all I've got for now. Currently planning for the new animation poll that will come after Kata Lux is done, and it's most likely going to be a bit different than the usual, so stay tuned for that. And the monthly suggestion of this month is also currently being worked on but not shown here, coming in about a week.

So yeah, lots of exciting stuff coming soon. Going to try to be better showing off WIPs here more frequently in the future since I realize not everyone keeps up with the Discord where I keep a channel that goes over the current status of all projects being worked on.

But that's all for now. Thank you all for your support and hope you all have a wonderful rest of the week!