January plan

Here's the cover image first, keeping up our good old tradition—some folks might want it.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Not sure if you guys are still in the middle of holiday break, but I'm personally super stoked to be back at my workstation.Alright, let's jump into today's topic. There's gonna be a bit more content than usual today because this ties into the stuff I was working on with my backup laptop while my graphics card literally exploded last week.

The first thing—and honestly the most important one—is what we're doing in January. Last month I said December was gonna be all about finishing the Requiem series plus wrapping up a bunch of those half-done short clips I'd shown off before—like the Nahida and Chisato ones that never got completed. That was the plan, but then my PC decided to straight-up die on me, so I couldn't get any of it done.By the way, even though my rig has a 5080 graphics card, I sent it back to the manufacturer, they spent a whole week "fixing" it and then told me nothing was wrong with the card. So that's when I started digging around to figure out what the hell was actually screwing up my computer.

Turns out the culprit was this fucking graphics card riser/adapter thing. Back when I got my PC built, the guy assembling it told me the card was too heavy and I'd need a different mounting setup, so he suggested buying a riser to install it in a cleaner, prettier way on the motherboard. Fine, I bought it.From the moment I got this rig in March, the thing kept having random screen freezes and crap like that. But I was too busy to deal with it, so I just kept putting it off—until last week when it finally wouldn't even boot anymore. All the symptoms screamed "graphics card failure," especially since I'd heard tons of people having 5080s die on them, so I yanked the card out and sent it straight for repair.They spent over a week messing with it and guess what? The card's perfectly fine. The problem was that goddamn riser/adapter the whole time. Fix was super simple: rip that thing out, plug the card directly into the motherboard slot like normal, then just prop it up with a little support stick underneath so it doesn't sag.What a ridiculous waste of time and stress lol.

Anyway, my PC is fixed now, and back when the screen kept freezing for long periods, someone already helped me out by going into the BIOS and underclocking the graphics card to make it more stable. It still froze sometimes, just way less often. Imagine buying a 5080 graphics card, but when you run it at full speed it causes freezes, so you dial it back to basically 5060 performance—and it STILL freezes occasionally.Now that I've yanked out that fucking graphics card riser/adapter, my card can actually run way better than before. I can clearly feel the performance boost—whether I'm playing animations or generating AI images, everything's smoother and faster.So yeah, my computer's fixed, and honestly it's performing better than it ever did.

Okay, next thing: While my PC was down, there was no way I was gonna build scenes on my backup laptop, so instead I focused on tweaking my existing character body types and fixing some known issues to make them way more compatible with the vast majority of resources and character cards floating around in the KK community.

The one at the top is the Mito model I used in Special Coaching, and the one at the bottom is the revised/updated version.

Actually, something I've known for a while is that because my characters are super heavily customized, about 95% of my scenes end up with serious misalignment, clipping, or bone issues if you swap in a different character. The reason is that when I was building most of my characters, I scaled down the body proportions or tweaked certain parts by shrinking them, so I'd have to separately adjust values in the scene to enlarge the character or the whole setup. Compared to most standard models, my characters are way smaller, which makes the scenes a lot harder for other people to use.

So I've made some tweaks now—the characters keep their original body proportions, but their overall size matches what most people in the KK community use for their character cards. This way, folks who have my SD files don't necessarily have to load the Chika card I included to make everything match my exact body shape just to use the scene properly.

These past few days I've been online downloading a bunch of character cards that other people made and testing them in my own scenes. Like I thought, about 95% of them have issues—bones getting all twisted and deformed, or huge height differences causing a ton of problems. Especially my more recent works, since they're way more precise; the older stuff actually fits better with other people's cards.Since I don't sell character cards and I'm not trying to pull an Apple and lock everything down, I figure my SD files should really work with most of the character cards out there in the community. I've known this for a while but never got around to fixing it—partly because I've been too busy, but mostly because of technical hurdles that I just couldn't figure out how to solve.But now that I've improved it, pretty much all my future SDs are gonna be in this new format.

At the same time, I also made better tweaks to my current character body types specifically for the Invade remake I already had planned for January. Honestly, I'd already redone these two characters before, but now it's a version that's way more... fitting to their actual character roles and vibe.

I’m not gonna describe what age these two characters’ body shapes are supposed to represent—otherwise it’ll cause a ton of trouble. You guys can figure it out on your own.

So—January's plan is still what I said last month: the Invade remake. I've been talking about remaking this series forever and had it planned out, but I kept dragging my feet way too long. So I'm finally wrapping up the Invade remake in January, no excuses.As for the stuff I originally said I'd do right after finishing Requiem—like Nahida, Chisato, and that almost-done Hololive goblin cave scene—those are getting pushed back to February now. That's the plan.

As for the rest of this month, I've got a collab project going with another creator. Right now we're planning it as a single-shot short clip. Since we don't have a ton of time, it's not realistic to turn every idea into some massive production. And since it's a collab with another creator, this video will be fully public and free to watch. We should be able to wrap it up before January rolls around, no problem.

Alright, that's all the content for today. If you've got any questions, feel free to hop into my server and ask, or just drop a comment down below—I'm always happy to answer you guys.

https://discord.gg/ffaaXsjkQ5