Neko 1.8: A Tail as Long as Time

7/19/18: A Tail as Long as Time

I apparently thought the year was 2020 a few times. I guess I never second-guessed it. Fixed that! This stream was all about getting the tail caught up with the current events. It took awhile but it's all caught up!

On the way to that catching up, It solved yet another problem! I was wondering how to get rid of this bag on the couch. Tail knocked it off! Love you, tail.

And now the tail caught Rin. Another problem saved by the tail. What a useful thing! Some clipping is fine here. A tail is soft and not like a rock.

In other news, I now have Alien Isolation set up for VR.
...
What have I done...

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7/18/18: Moar Kitty

I'm starting to think I accidentally put the wrong date somewhere because this was definitely yesterday.

Neko has finally stood up for a good house comparison and she's HUGE.

And growing into the ceiling. The unexpected head bump causes her to drop Rin. *Insert Jojo reference.
I swear I didn't have time yesterday to get back home and take some easy pictures. Right after the stream, I wasn't home again until 10:30pm. Slept right after.

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7/18/18: Joycons with Blender

So this stream was all about cleaning up the fallen animation. LOTS of hand fixing since I forgot to set it up like the feet where there were 2 ik bones. One at the tip so that the feet would point there and lift off from there and one at the heel to do the main control since the tip is parented to it. It's far smoother for hands and it would've helped here. But it's ok, some slight hand trembling at that part is not a reason to go all the way back to the beginning to reanimate the hands.
(We're about to see when I rewatch the footage)

The pictures would mostly be the same as the last ones below, so no updates there. What is brand new is that I got so lazy that I didn't even want to hold my keyboard for shortcuts anymore. I theorized in chat if I could use JoyToKey to make my left Joycon be a keyboard shortcut device and boi did that WORK!

I'm not animating in Blender ever again without such a useful tool like the Joycon doing this. I'm still sad that there's no analog feedback, but I'll just use that as an extra D-pad for more shortcuts!

7/17/18: Rough Landing

This stream was a lot about fixing small movement during their fall so that it would make sense. LOTS of hand fixing.

Here, I added a part where Rin gets completely rubbed by Neko as she gets up. Pretty hot.

So during the stream, I was planning on having the Neko get up alone with Rin being slower. Then she'd pick Rin up along with the bag.
Then Deadpool has to recommend having Neko pick up Rin like she's a mother cat. That idea was so strong that I completely changed the part to where Neko now picks up Rin as shown, grows to hit her head on the cieling, drops Rin, catches her with tail, then picks up bag to go to bedroom. The trickiest part is to make sure Rin stays a consistent size because parenting her to the Neko's face makes her grow too. So I gotta adjust for that. Should be easy if it goes like I think it will!

One last picture to show where Part 2 will be. Also, Windows 10 doesn't have its picture viewer anymore. I kinda liked it because it was functional. I'm surprised they deleted it in this update.

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7/16/18: Good Surprises

(This update took forever today)
In the past, I thought I remembered having to use bones for animation. Something where I'd have to completely redo bag animation but using a 1 root armature instead of mesh movements.

Well here's some damn good news! The couch imported into Unreal WITH EVERYTHING! All movements and changes imported perfectly. (I gotta set sequencer animation weight way higher for some reason, but whatever) I still have to edit the F'd up 3 layer bags in order to import those, but this is AMAZING news! It means I can edit the objects in the house for getting shoved around in Blender, then simply import that into Unreal. I still have to figure out the LODs on the treats making them invisible though, but maybe if I re-import them with different settings it will fix it.

In other news, the Downtown city pack was finally on sale!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDbNfhzeqiY
I bought that and an auto-landscape generator. Now I can just build the map without worrying about blueprinting textures to perfectly overlap or make perfect cliff texture things. This will save a LOT of time.

This is a medieval version of the main map I want to make for Kaiju Club and a ton of future videos. The plan is to build it up within City Destruction Test, Pool Remix, and the Ahri Vid. This way every single video can provide massive progress to the 4 episode series. In other words, every video after Neko will take place on this map as I use them to build it up.

*If you look at the map upside down, it's a familiar shape!

Now let's get to some images from UE4!

I've added a post-process volume box for just inside the building, then I used a LUT that I bought to help spice up the colors to something more warming, lastly I raised the global illumination so that it's not all so dark.

Here we see the heartwarming yet insanely huge cuddling going on.
It's putting a strain on the couch though. (I made Rin drop the treat bag when she gets grabbed because it got in the way during this scene)
I love the way the socks are lit here after adding a light to be in front of the couch!

The couch is at its breaking point!

This animation is really starting to hit its stride. I still need to fully animate the tail, but I'll do that after they get up from the floor so that Rin can get grabbed by it. Also facial expressions... and the hair.

Another thing I'm messing with is lightmap resolution on the walls. They don't look so disgustingly grungy anymore but I still have more testing to do. Either way, I love this lighting now!