Lana's first Hscene animated.

Heyo again everyone! This week has been another busy one. Usually I try to give myself a couple weeks to do these animations, but with the new workflow I am going to be trying to fit them in a week for pacing's sake. I don't think this will effect quality (though I suppose I'm not necessarily the only judge of that ahah). Anyways! Let's get in to the progress update!

The first thing I did was break the image up into layers as always. There are a nice mix of expressions this time around.

After breaking it up, the next day I meshed and rigged the full model.

I also played a bit more with IK settings on certain instances. This is a time saver, and looks better than some of the other methods I was using in Spunkstock.

Once all the bones were set up, I moved onto Control Parameters. For those who are curious what I mean when I say this, I'll dive a bit into it here.

When I create the mesh from the first day, I have these parameters in mind. I set 4 points of "head direction", and more the vertices to match the corresponding direction. This way if I want the morph to happen in the future, I can simply adjust the parameter, and it will replicate my morphing set up.

You might be asking, whats the point of this if you have it rigged with bones? Bones morph and create movement too. Well this allows me to do any form of perspective movement WITHOUT animating bones. We will add this movement to the rig movement when it comes time to animate.

Having 2 separate types of movement can add a pretty fluent dynamic, especially when playing with perspective,

In this instance I created a "Body Direction" parameter. What I made this do is essentially have the pelvis "fold over" her tummy, and flick up/down. With it on, you can see her pelvic bone fold above, and cover the belly button, but once I remove the body direction's keyframes, her entire torso becomes much more static. The bones are still offset to give it some movement, but the body direction parameter gives it that extra level of "dynamics"

Once these parameters were set, it's animation time. I started with the base loops.

This time there's a bit of other action.

There is another animation I won't be showing here, but these are the base loops. There is one big thing I want to address though. At the moment Hscenes are just "click the loops" until the scene is done. There will likely be a form of overhaul at a certain point in terms of how they are set up. There is still a decent chance they will have dialogue in the scenes, and something along the lines of requirements for certain loops. There is still some brainstorm I am going to need to do when I get the chance. I just am not quite feeling the coherency quite yet. At least not enough for implementation.

This is probably the better set up for now anyways with how early the game is, and with how progression really isn't in place yet.

Anyways! The next day I focused on the climax animations and the next was overall integration (basic UI etc).

With that this scene wrapped up for now. I was hoping to jump right into the 2nd hscene, however due to some circumstances, there may be some rearranging in scheduling. This upcoming week's progress report may not be quite as uniform, but we will see. I am going to be jumping into the "polish" week now, and address the next animations in the coming weeks after.

This means I'm likely going to be addressing all loose ends I can think of. This will likely include finishing up the initial look and set up for the dialogue system, along with writing the scripts for conversation animations. There is also a LOT of polish to flesh out in the gameplay department. There are several SFX I need to whip up, along with finishing off the core of the affinity system.

There is a decent chance the affinity system will have no real purpose (or extremely little) in this build. You will still probably be able to build affinity and see when/where it may increase, but the applications will likely be yet to come.

Anyways! That should do it. I'll catch you all next week with some technical updates/polish. (maybe some animation depending on some things.)

-Regulus