azmaybe9

Mythra April vid

Snuck this out today and wanted to share it here before tomorrow!

Michiru Blender progress

Update on where I am right now with things.

. Michiru vid is gaining speed quick. There's gonna be more simulated destruction here than ever before since I need to know how different materials are properly destroyed.

. There will also be shoes being grown out of with tearing for a first try on that.

. The animation has reached the first quarter done except for facial animations and physics.

. What's next is that she then stands up and tries to fight her shape/size shifting and loses, forcing her to have to sit down to fit in. And then barely fitting while sitting down. 360 VR is gonna rock here with her body all around the camera!

. Neko vid lighting remaster currently at part 2 bedroom scene

. Morag and Brighid vid is currently being written by 2 writers. One obsessed with game accuracy.

. Immense Kaiju Club progress behind everything. Animation for an alpha teaser is there, but that's a quarter of the effort needed to make it look how I want. Won't see much for awhile about this still, but it's nice to know that something that's taken years to set up is reaching the production process in some areas.

. I'm also thinking of redoing the destruction in some areas for Neko vid so they look better.

Ground Destruction Test & Neko vid Re-Lighting

To be honest, this month has sucked extremely bad. Loss of our only family dog, non-stop drama multiple times a week that requires my careful attention or things split apart, lack of energy throughout my days, discovered I have tinnitus, (inevitable with my tmj, but this SUCKS as a composer! The ringing gets so loud) and I even felt so down I couldn't animate properly at the beginning of last week. I was able to regain that near the end of the week real quick though. VRChat has been fun, but I wanted to get some kind of something going to help me feel actually better and get some stuff going on the Patreon. First off, Ground destruction in Blender.

It seems simple looking at the finished thing but figuring it out was what I was worried about. In UE4, I had a block come down and then another one come up for floor destruction there so I tried the same thing here. This time I used an oval and a ring to get the same effect in higher quality and it's really good! Even better than Apex destruction! And yes, actually simple too.

I'm trying to use Fracture Iterator more as this started kinda crappy but it really became something as I fractured the broken pieces once they started flying. Really helped make it look good. Had to adjust gravity and speed of the rigid body world because everything is super huge in order to be compatible with UE4's scaling.
Another thing i'll have to test in the future is texturing the inside vs the outside. Cell fracture thankfully does separate the inside materials created so I can pull that off so I just gotta learn the texture part.

In other news, here's a screenshot of the differences in Neko vid between before and after the lighting changes.

I still need to add text and jokes back in after hiding everything when Neko crushes the place. Lighting wise, the way the lights hit the characters are far more natural and allow softness rather than flat character shadows and hard brightness. Still adjusting character materials though like Rin's hair. What's gotten a HUGE upgrade is the environment lighting. Instead of things being super dark and the brightness artificially raised in post process, I fixed all that thanks to working on the Michiru picture and learning more about cinematic lighting. I will have a tutorial out on youtube soon for that as I just recorded the footage and now have to edit it all together. 

It's funny how it took A LOT of work to fix the lighting to be natural and get even close to what it originally was. But it's all the better for it. The setup here is a fill/rectangle light facing the living room. The point light bulbs are mostly used for getting the regular light from lamps and whatever makes sense. The 2 spotlights are going to be moving to keep characters lit well, but it won't be too noticeable since you think that the light is simply coming from the lamps. Also just now learning that soft source radius somehow softens shadows taken from that light. Looking into that more.

Still, I couldn't truly solve why the framerate is so damn heavy in this project! I was able to get it to 30fps at least from 12fps. Which is crazy because I get dips down to 60fps on the Marin/Diane map! (I can't see framerates above 60fps on this monitor so it's all fine since UE4 tries to maintain 120fps)
There's also a huge issue where the project does NOT want to be in higher post process engine quality. So depth of field and higher post process fx is unfortunately out the window.

Anyways, there's definitely plans for 180 VR. (Which likes low usage of post process anyways) What will be massively helpful is that this is the first project I did Blender destruction for! (I was experimenting what the best method for destruction was and this was too performance heavy since I did it in the main Blender project... which is also a 3-part project mess in Blender instead of just using different actions. I know to do destruction in a separate project now though for performance!)
The huge benefit is no re-rendering if the destruction messes up mid-render! It's baked from Blender to UE4 and acts like a character animation! But I think I might redo it all with what I know in Blender using Fracture Iterator now.

Also thinking of adding more portraits.

Streamin'

This time I have a wrist brace to see if that helps my wrist from tiring out.

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Working on more tough stuff like reaching through the door and walking over the camera.

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I'm gonna try to get as much done as possible today before the month is up. But at least it also turns out this video will be 360 vr compatible like Yoko's so that's gonna be nice!

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So I spent some time to learn more tail animation techniques this time rather than 2 obnoxious IK constraints that constantly fight each other like Neko vid. This time it's a bit more basic. Simply grab them all and rotate them together with individual points set to on.
Then delay the keyframes of the later tail parts.

Another thing that will be practiced is clothes ripping, At least for her shoes.

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Last one delved into more lighting changes and speed changes. Gonna continue remastering

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I still think I should remaster the lighting in this so if this goes from sound to UE4, don't be surprised!

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Like Morag is gonna require world building and Neko vid is gonna require lots of sound stuff.
I kinda want to get a little bit of animation in this month before starting

Edit: Turned into a cinematic lighting test but there might still be a small animation with Michiru

Giganta VR

First of all, not much stuff watches Youtube VR clearly anymore for NO REASON. Even Opera requires an older version for web VR support because the feature became buggy in recent updates. (Framerate dropped to 10fps)

After doing testing on the best ways to currently watch VR videos, it's to download the 4k version from my MEGA and then use DEOVR or whatever to play it offline.

MEGA: https://mega.nz/folder/aPZRgSqD
Key: #OAeWjKpEvm4Hd0zMjH9knw

Well this came out AMAZING!

Disabling volumetric fog helped get this done but somehow it feels a little more realistic without all the foggy purple. It's fine!

Also, I think this might be the clearest VR version I've made yet! I might not need 8k versions at all after figuring out clearing things up a bit. (I still rendered from UE4 in 8k and exported to Youtube in 8k, then exported to 4k in Adobe for it to be so clear)

I think a tiny bit of sharpening in the future might be the ticket to even better visuals. It kinda improves footage up to a certain small point.

Tiers Update

I think I know what I want to do at the tail end of the Patreon tiers now.

I screwed up by starting the 1 month timer with the Soundless Beta because I now realize SO MUCH needs done for polishing afterwards. On top of that, the recent few videos were me TRYING to make short videos but I guess everything just takes time if i'm trying to learn something. So I cut anything that said short videos. Plus, you can't have a 1 month-ish early VR vid if there's no sound for immersion.

I want to define the line between $5 and $15 a bit more. 

Now the $5 tier will get the Soundless Betas because those are technically works in progress and not the final version of the video. But that's where that ends. Which gives PLENTY to look forward to when the full version releases.

For $15, the tier will get the full final version once it's done AND THEN the 1 month timer starts. The VR versions i've been getting used to making will come soon after during that period. Which reminds me to put those techniques back in older videos as I plan for Morag with a writing team.

This should eliminate that feeling of accomplishment I had at the start of February when there was still much more work to do and I had to fight myself to get back into it for like a week or two. Sure, I could've used the break but it took too long to get back still. This will also give MUCH more time for me to work on something new and hopefully build up videos consistently releasing instead of throwing something out but the time burns out in 1-2 weeks. Creating a bit of dead air here that makes me feel like I gotta rush again for the next video.

Giganta Early Access

This took a long time but now I know that I will be doing destruction simulation in Blender and not using Apex anymore. 

I also have more of an idea for lighting cinematically.

It seems my future is filled with lighting and learning simulation fx! Hell yeah!

Giganta Re-lighting Comparisons

Well the only things left to do for the video are to add in high Tier Patron names, fix mis-spellings, and balance the audio levels for everything! For now, I wanted to show the differences paying a bit more attention to lighting can make.

Now i'm no lighting expert but adding lights to the car and one big somewhat red light basking the building in the background, kinda like a villain with a spotlight on them, all seemed to work out for the better. Because the destructible road didn't want to update its lighting, I changed the road behind it to also be destructible so at least the broken lighting on them feels consistent. A new thing I learned from a free pack on the UE4 marketplace are these things called lighting profiles. So what they do is shape how the light... lights. Like a car headlight sends out light shapes differently than a lamp kinda thing. It's really cool and add a LOT of detail here.

And here we have a very good view on me screwing up the name in the back. I added random spotlights to the theater to hide the actual theater name behind the Patron and it also looked more theater-y in this sun-setting time.

Here I moved the cel-shaded lighting to make the face more pronounced and such. Quite a few post process and shadow color changes as well. I wanted to ground myself a bit more. Have the world be less ridiculously colorful and instead have those colors be like highlights. It really does make the image more vibrant instead of being vibrant with everything to make it look flat. The sky had so much more detail uncovered because of this approach!

So I realized today that I've entered a point where animating isn't entirely the focus anymore. I've reached simulation levels as the next thing to learn. Above, the first Obelisk was cracked with UE4 Apex Destruction. It go the job done, but not cinematically. More like for a game. The 2nd image the Obelisk was destroyed in Blender using an add-on called FRACTURE ITERATOR. In which... it made so much of the process so easy that I could freely cllick what I wanted to fracture when then it just does it. Then I can do it again and again. On top of that, I can control when a group of pieces fracture and it doesn't change previous animation. CRAZY powerful stuff and already gives great results. In order to export, I had to bake the keyframes and it had a 1-click button for that too! Moving forward with simulations, Blender is where all simulations will now be done. Especially since it's baked and there's no finger-crossing that Apex doesn't mess up or have random destruction flying at the camera. But all simulations will have to be done in a separate project because holy shit does Blender crash when i'm learning new simulation things. Also to save performance.  But light physics like small objects getting knocked around can stay being done in UE4. Unless I come across those getting super buggy like for the tipping building. Then I could put it in Blender.

The added smoke really helps make this look brutal.

QUITE a few added things here! I added rubble pieces that were parented to the building and a shitload of smoke spawning as it gets picked up to mask how bad the chunks of building were. There's gonna be a lot of thick smoke in this vid but somehow I really like how it looks. I also added rubble to the bottom building to make it look like it was torn off. All this stuff exists inside before it even gets torn off but it look convincing!

This is when I realized how powerful lighting profiles are. I don't know how they work and I just slap some downloaded UE4 assets on them but they add some much visual texture to the lighting. Also there's some random rubble pieces in here. I could've deleted the floor in different areas and all that but this is good enough. Man did the post-process changes help this shot a ton.

Fun fact! The rubble on the left is exactly the same from the mid-section of the building that stays while the above gets torn off. Simply teleported it to in front here. The building in the center looks MUCH better with the replaced rubble on top of the floor areas. Looks good as a first try but i'm pretty sure floors aren't built like that.

It was too damn foggy before so i'm glad that the changes to exponential fog helped with this scene.

This is the biggest WOW to me! This feels more realistic and the colors that were sacrificed actually pop better here. I knew in my brain the lighting looked flat before but I couldn't put my finger on it until I studied a lot more on more natural lighting. So I think the future will focus on natural lighting but with elements of color brandishing it. It feels more impactful.

Oh, I added lighting to all the street lights! Remind me to delete that one facing the park though.

Some expressions changes on Ms. Marvel here because it looked like her face froze previously. Cool thing about having bones for facial expressions is that I could change everything using UE4's animation editor! Plus this look is a bit more smug.

Giganta Destruction Behind the Scenes

Wanted to do a bit of behind the scenes on this one because of all the destruction and as a note for the future on what works and what doesn't.

So first of all, I hate the ground view lighting. It's very flat and the colors pop only at building height. Working on changing that for the final release. But now what's interesting is the destruction here. 

So the road was created in blocks in the demo map I used. So it was easy to use Apex fracturing to crack it into a bunch of small pieces. Unfortunately, something happened where this road is much darker than the non-destructive roads.
There's a few elements to ground destruction. You need:
. THICK cube road rectangle and NOT flat road
. A ground of rubble underneath
. Collision boxes that rise on the outside and sink on the inside.
(Although I noticed in Pacific Rim that they dropped the center of the road in footsteps and everything flew up and out from underneath somehow. Houdini Fx stuff I don't know.
Some people do great stomps in games using Niagara fx that even include making the ground look destroyed. Fuckin' magic to me.

I wanted to keep the destructive road stuff going so there's a few more awesome steps here in the distance with the exact same setup. Road gets destroyed as the ground/collision underneath lift up and the collision attached to Giganta's boot sink into it.

This flat plane is actually the same thing copied around under other roads and is a landscape object. It's really flattened on the z-axis but the premade bumps and hills I added to it appear by scaling vertically up again.

It's a great effect for beginning and is thankfully easy to accomplish on this map because of the block-built roads. Obviously, if I want to do this in the future, I gotta figure out making roads into thicker cubes as well as converting splines into meshes for fracturing. And man that right foot looks bad but thankfully we don't see that as the camera is in the building.

Here, the smoke effects were activated at the same time as the destruction rather than being attached to pieces fracturing. Well it does both, but all the smoke went downwards. Anyways, this looks pretty good, honestly. Might apply more smoke fx activating at the same time to make destruction more impactful. Obviously doesn't look as good as simulated smoke but that's something to look into.

This I feel is where my laziness and first mistakes are with destruction. I always feared that I'd have to rebuild the building but with more detail put into how it's made so I tried cutting it up basically in Blender and then I'd let Apex edges fill in the rest.
Result came out like crap. It's fine in this vid because the focus isn't on this building's pieces coming apart too much. But future vids  are gonna require practice remaking a "game-ready" building in Blender and then maybe fracturing it in Physx, then either putting it in UE4 or back to Blender if possible. Not being able to cache destruction in UE4 is a MASSIVE problem because each render has a bit of luck to question just what will happen with the destruction. The problem with putting it in Blender? SLOWS THE PROJECT DOWN SO BAD. I'd have to simulate the destruction with practically everything hidden and wait for a bake before hopefully showing everything else again. All because I can't figure out recording what happens to Apex destruction in UE4. Chaos destruction won't have this problem in the future.

So this video was written with zero lines for Wonder Woman because she has ZERO facial expressions on the model. Yes, I know i'm a dumbass for picking a model and animating it without checking for bones or shapekeys on the face. But a HUGE improvement in this scene is how Giganta grows. Beforehand, it was a really BORING stance of control with smooth growth. Growth as the most boring part of my video? NOT IN THIS HOUSE! So I completely re-animated it to be much more angrier as she aggressively gets bigger and demands more space.

The destruction at the bottom right of this scene actually happened offscreen when she stomps down to grow, but it adds a lot of flavor here to me seeing that a bit later. I also have some of the same ground destruction going on here for the concrete. Came out better than expected, really. This time the ground collision slowly inches towards the edge as the ground lifts up and slides with it.

I need to adjust this Obelisk for the umpteenth time. The destruction here should be good instead of solid but there were issues I'm still having with it...

So the obelisk destroyed pieces keep freezing in mid-air for no reason at all. I'm completely confused by it but if only I could record what happens to it, then it wouldn't feel like i'm overloading Apex destruction or something as it freezes itself. Idk, everything else seems to work perfectly fine.

While this picture doesn't make sense, it looks better in motion with the tree getting kicked down as the wall goes flying away from another invisible collision box.

This came out just great. This is when I first tried the whole thing with the ground coming up after getting destroyed. I also had to adjust the gravity of the level to be WAY higher because these rocks got hit so hard they flew to space! (I love stuff that just goes flying though so I kept that up. But of course, making this look more severe lost the subtle cracking from Chaos... but this is more satisfying.

I tried pulling off the same thing in the background but for some reason, it doesn't want to fly everything up like the previous time. Still looks pretty good though!

Meanwhile this destruction looks fucking terrible on the outside. It will do for now as the weakest part of my video because I don't want to spend another month recreating this building. But I will make up for this basic cracking by using more smoke effects like the building top and adding more office stuff falling down with the inner floors. This building kinda just shits out its floors and that's kinda funny. Building cracks a bit and all the floors just give way!

But THIS came out as I hoped! Missing the walls between desks though because Apex destruction just went fuckin' nuts and yet another reason for it to be recorded. 

This was done by taking all the objects, slightly raising them off the floor, then dropping them at a really steep angle. UE4 CAN record objects that are simple physics because it records their transforms. This was GREAT because I could then save it in its own sequence and add it to the main sequence. The trickiest part was parenting all the recorded physics to something and moving them into place. I had to convert the sequence spawned items to possessable so that they'd stay in the project outliner instead of spawning only when the sequence started. This allowed me to parent the objects to a cube and then move the cube into the correct place. For some reason, the cube moved to the world origin point instead of staying in a nice spot to move from. So it was tricky to get the objects to be put into place and then parented to the falling building. Looks GREAT though! Based it on WW's location.

Here I want a shitload of particles to spawn. You can see I adjusted the camera to obviously block the shot of seeing the building that gets hit. This is because that front building piece crashed UE4 every single time I tried to crack it. Even further proof that proper building destruction requires parts put together that are pre-fractured rather than fracturing the whole thing at once. *sigh... at least now I know.
Funny thing, I couldn't get smoke fx to show up on the fractured pieces of destruction for awhile and gave up. In order to see this smoke in a much thicker manner, I raised the opacity of the instance it came from. Suddenly the smoke for everything else was visible!

Now I LOVE this shot. It came out great. I wanted a similar thing to how a serial killer drags their weapon on the ground but it's for Giganta lifting her back foot by dragging it on the ground. You only get this kinda stuff with villain characters, man.

Ground and brick walls are Apex, Machines in front and barrels were physics, and the trees and light pole that fell over are manually animated. Who knew all this stuff would have to combine together to create a better destructive scene! On top of that, I want a bunch of particle fx in the air raining down here from how hard Giganta destroyed this building.

I plan to cover up all this shoddy Blender cutting with higher quality rubble but something tells me I won't be able to affect the scene too much.

Huh. Actually, I made shape keys for the inner building levels to bend downwards and that's missing here. Good catch self! Thanks! Don't forget adding rubble on the left side!

Despite some failures, I'd say that this was a successful first try at getting actually pretty damn destructive. I can begin to get more detailed in future projects to be where I want it to be but this is good enough for now. What's great is that it's all done in one take! But I fear yet again that not being able to record Apex destruction happening with no tutorials online to do so will leave me going back to Blender somehow. I just hope I can fracture using Physx lab still. Really powerful destruction tools.
One of the most important things I learned here is that the better you create an object/building, the better it gets destroyed. There are no shortcuts here and I've still yet to add like little particle fx rubble flying around from the destruction and simulated smoke. But one step at a time at each project. I spent a long time just trying to get something to work with Chaos but it wasn't ready yet in terms of slideshow performance. Something tells me the results would've looked slightly better, but the techniques for how the objects were destroyed would still look kinda bad.
It's all about no-shortcut techniques here. How something is built and how detailed the fractures are based on what the person is expecting. Then adding the smaller smoke and particles for polish.

Edit: It looks like Blender doesn't import physx stuff and has its own thing with Cell Fracture add-on.  *Sigh. Another thing to learn. This would completely change my workflow yet again on destruction. I guess I better prepare for maybe a separate Blender project focused only on destroying the remade building where I guess I import only the animated balls and cubes that are attached to characters? Idk. Seems a bit too roundabout but I might learn something on performance saving.

It seems that if I wanna do this right, it's Blender vs Houdini simulation. Blender could be WAY easier to learn vs Houdini's cinematic control. Man, this is gonna suck. But I will try to find the most straightforward path through and Blender is most likely the cheapest way for that at least. I'll retry Blender before going through Houdini learning hell.

I did an interview!

So this is pretty interesting in that there's a size community interviewer who's going around talking to artists and stuff on his blog. He's got plenty of interesting interviews on others and other stuff to check out.
I think this is a really cool way to bring artists more down to Earth and connect their efforts to people.

The interview he did with me says "brief" but I do it like I always do and blow past the intended mark! Lost my original formatting though, but it's fine.

Giganta Silent Beta Vid

Polished quite a bit and now let the 1 month clock start!
There's still a few more things to work on for rubble and maybe change up some post processing, but I wanted to get this out in "good enough" for starting work on getting voice actors and sound. All that good stuff!

Giganta Apex Destruction

Since Chaos wasn't performative enough to do the building ripping scene without turning into less than a slideshow, I had to go back to Yoko's Apex Destruction and recreate all the destruction.

I still need to get smoke fx going but I feel like Chaos did a better job at adding depth chunks to places that didn't have anything. Apex requires assets to have a closed system in order to provide depth to its cracking and it shows that weakness in the building destruction with the flat roof cracks.

There IS a way to modify these things using Physx Labs though for GREAT control. It's just should I follow-through my future with destruction learning Apex more properly or should I go for something like Houdini FX? That's what all the movie studios use and it looks insanely polished!
I'm gonna give Houdini a shot. Free to use in-program with a 1 year free trial to bring assets over to UE4. (Not for this project though)

Current Plans

Ms. Marvel 4k VR finally rendered! Damn thing kept coming out with only a black screen until now:
MEGA: https://mega.nz/folder/aPZRgSqD
Key: OAeWjKpEvm4Hd0zMjH9knw/folder/XSQHVYKC
(Patreon doesn't like the link with the key at the end for some reason)

I believe the Ms. Marvel camera VR thing went so well, i'm gonna attempt to convert as much previous videos as I can into VR in the same way. I also re-opened the Samus vid's files and found out my previous attempt at a 360 VR version accidentally deleted a LOT of the effects BUT the original sequences are intact! Since this time i'm going for camerawork rather than steady 360 vr movement, it should be easier to implement with less motion sickness. (The knowledge that following a character doesn't bring motion sickness will help greatly)

Giganta vid. Man. I'm intimidated by implementing all this destruction. I need to get back to it so I can get used to doing it rather than be scared of it. The next bit involves ground destruction and I've been over-thinking it SO much. Great progress though. It's not the learning phase anymore. It's the doing phase and i'm worried about how long it might take. But the more of a bitch I am, the less time I have. (This is usually where I tell myself "don't be a bitch" and then do some long stream that gets ALL the hard work done)

Marin vid is gonna be on the backburner again but for a very different reason. Last year, I paid TalesofScale to remaster her WiiU and Link Hyrule Warriors models. (Her model is terrible up close) I didn't think he'd take this long to get to it, but he says i'm next. (Thankfully, his health is recovering) It's taking ME far longer to get to her anyways. (Also intimidated by another long form video) May as well jump in with the best possible version, right? Plus, I think her new script cut it a bit too short. Doesn't even adventure on the island!

But then Morag from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Not only will that have mega destruction but also an army? Psh. What do I get myself into with these things. I feel like I stack massive burgers on my plate rather than too many pies. But the only path is forward. Focus on one thing at a time and get it done.

Genshin Impact test vr vid. So uh... idk how to scale the camera anymore for some reason. The plug-in updated and the creator moved everything around. Gotta go looking again. I did try the IPD adjustment, but it just made the world either flatter in depth or weird with depth. The "Scale zone" was actually clipping adjustment.

Kaiju Club news. I'm now capable of animating a preview scene so we can go for an Epic Megagrant! (Main character of the show's model is done and rigged) Naturally, since everything I do leads up to this show, the preview scene will involve everything i'm learning above PLUS learning new special fx using FluidNinja. But for now, the visual art style I've always wanted to strive for has just been achieved with a screenshot I worked on. Can't share it though because even though the visual style is nailed down, there's a city to create.
But trust me that this shit is MOVIN' in the background!

Giganta Chaos Destruction Testing

Happy New Year!

So to get this all going, it took like 2 days of 7-hour tutorials. One day was for learning Chaos destruction and cutting up the building and the other was learning just a sample of Niagara so I could troubleshoot why smoke wasn't popping up when destruction happened. Of course, probably still best to add smoke just as Giganta collides with the building so that it looks more obvious. (Beforehand the smoke only happened after the pieces crumbled underneath just like the monument)

But with how this building was cut up in these pictures below, you're gonna see some serious shit in this video.

Here's the game plan for destruction right now on a building scale.
First, cut up the building how I want in Blender. Then if it's a flat panel of building, add some inner layer wall for UE4 to fracture it with. (I got lucky that this building had thickness to its walls but the next building won't be so lucky for me) Then Export the different layers of cuts into UE4 as separate skeletons. The destroyed piece in the beginning isn't a skeleton building part anymore so I guess I don't need to do this too much. But I was thinking that I needed to add shape keys so the inner side of this building could sag like it's supposed to. Gotta get that implemented.

Once it's all in UE4, add in rubble and junk to make the cut off parts look better. It turns out I can keep parts of Chaos together around the edges of the destruction so I gotta look into doing that. Looks GREAT on that corner of the building chunk at the beginning.

Ground destruction will be interesting. It's like pushing up the sides around her foot while the inner part will be pushed down into a void that's hidden by dirt. Meanwhile, some random dirt landscape I created will be moved upwards smoothly for the smushed effect. I bet i'll get better at this over time when particles get involved. Speaking of getting better, I need to use Quixel Megascans assets. Crazy high quality potential there!

On top of this, I have a building getting ripped in half and thrown at WW... Jesus, I did not let myself escape destruction this time. NO shortcuts here. It's gonna be GREAT!

Some people during the stream were saying to set up a fight between Ms. Marvel and Giganta at the end. With a fight between Diane and Mt. Lady planned, I think I might pass for now... It COULD be cool though. (That line of thinking has failed me up the ladder so far so it's a maybe) 

We'll see if building destruction goes as well as current implementation has gone. If it does, then i'm down for fucking up a city block for them to fight!

Giganta Blender Preview

This is looking damn good already! A few animation issues and no facial expressions I gotta fix but this is close to done on the animation side!

Looking at what i'm doing to buildings for this one... psh... I really got some work cut out for me. Going all in on destruction this time! Gotta practice it somewhere!

Not all the camerawork is final but I gotta avoid Wonder Woman's face because I accidentally picked a model that doesn't have facial expressions. Whoops!
More of the limited frame animation with full frame animation technique will be here. So Wonder Woman gets to take advantage of shortcuts like freezing her body while Giganta needs all the motion.

Giganta Finish Line!

2 Things left.

Destroy freezing Obelisk in Blender.
Balance Audio.

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Trying out better lighting, adding missing fx, fixing stuff in for the final version of the animtion!

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After sound, I'm going back to the animation and adding a bunch of fx and fixing the lighting to be less flat.

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Boy am I tired but I think I can get a lot of sound done today!
Edit: Yup. More than halfway done!

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I can get the silent version done for tonight

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Apex Destruction has been going insanely well! A few hiccups here and there but generally its been working out fast enough that I'll add a little bit more to the animation as I finish off a ton of things today!

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So after ripping a building in half and discovering that Chaos just isn't performative enough yet because it's still in beta, I now have to redo all the destruction so far using Apex Destruction. The thing I used for Yoko vid.

Thankfully I know what i'm doing with that now so maybe I can get similar results!

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After taking a lot of notes on destruction with Chaos before. (Lots of hard lessons)
I think i'm more confident on the multiple steps up of ripping a building in half! This will be the most intense usage of Chaos yet and i'm gonna attempt it all in UE4 without Blender. I have this feeling it's possible.

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All about controlling the physics and finding my own way to activate them without using the whole destructive fields thing. Maybe I can use physics balls to do things like I'm used to!

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Wow. I forgot the stream lnk the first time. That's embarrassing.

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I'm gonna focus on finishing off this Giganta vid. I know it's not Marin, but Giganta takes place where Ms. Marvel did and is already close to done for animation from that one Sunday awhile ago. Now that Blender's crashing is fixed, I can continue!

Genshin Impact VR Test (Downmload)

MEGA Download: https://mega.nz/file/LXpmkYQL

Key: N-JOLQyKtPWc_wVDdNUtIiK6g9iJhCKHR1DWWyc6UYQ

Now this I wanted to see how the limited frame animation would hit in VR. Not bad.

Also people on a forum for Camera 360 said to use MSAA for sharper looks, but I just see a need for heavier anti-aliasing.

I forgot how to scale the camera/ world scale in VR or the setting moved. Need to find that again before getting to Neko vid.

https://youtu.be/54Z13Gxg2FA

Ms. Marvel VR 180 Beta (Download)

So I just realized that maybe Youtube's VR app doesn't make unlisted stuff viewable and doesn't show up on DeoVR or Gizmo so here's the download to help test.

MEGA Download: https://mega.nz/file/vfxykCbT

Key: MP0UUOuZ-3mCUBhEhR3IgVQfNSY33M1vS8MxH6jY-ew

It turns out that having Raytracing on in the project settings despite the VR renderer using screenspace reflections brought the rendering to its knees and crashed UE4 multiple times. Idk how the creator of 360 Camera did it, but I need more practice before attempting that. Btw, this wouldn't stop crashing SINCE the non-VR version got done until I figured it out yesterday. So I've been a bit frustrated about streaming when that's all the progress has been. (and irl problems that i've slowly solved)
Also, cinematic options, turn those off on UE4 rendering. They can make the render slow to an impossible crawl when all my quality settings are set to an already fine Epic.

So for the VR for this vid, I wanted to try an expanded video kinda setup where people who enjoy my camerawork can keep it while getting the sense of world that VR provides. (And now that I figured out another way to do limited animation with root motion, THAT can be kept in VR as well. THAT'S gonna be trippy cool to see that nobody has done yet... actually, I have a Genshin Impact test vid I could use)

I personally think I should remove all upward panning of the camera. I've also got more lip syncing to redo. Also there's something weird going on around the shadows, trees, and edges of the screen. Like some kind of film grain that shouldn't be on messing with the quality.

Tell me what you think about this in the comments and if it makes you sick. The only time I felt a bit woozy was fighting the camera as it panned upwards when I wanted to keep looking at the interaction going on at the ground. (And there's plenty of vertical headroom added now too to adjust so I think i'll do that)

But I think maybe going into this expecting the same camerawork as the regular video helps a lot to combat sickness.

Samus Sound

I've been working on Samus Sound off stream for awhile. I'm just gonna leave this up here while I work out notifying everything.

I really want to get this out without timed stuff so that Samus and Ms. Marvel don't walk over each other AND because this has been due out for awhile.

Man. The development hell is finally over. Tell me what you think!
Oh! Gotta upload what I composed too

Ms Marvel Test Run

FINALLY! I can be at peace with where this is!

Raytracing for reflection clarity, some removal of overblurring, rooftop details, a new awesome take of voice acting, and now this is RET-2-GO!

I had a lot of fun with making the thumbnail! Probably should've made it in high quality detail rather than in 1280x720 for Youtube's thumbnail. Came out sicker than I thought it would!

Ms Marvel Sound Alpha

So this has gone well despite me now realizing that my new headphones weren't accurately portraying sound and maybe I need to adjust the levels of stuff again. (It's like a hyper real surround sound boost, so maybe I don't have to rework Samus!)

But I still need to redo some footsteps sfx and such. I do like some parts of the voice acting but I'm wondering if I can have Monstrassa go over this again in maybe a more natural tone for her.

I didn't want to take this long on this nor Samus but stuff happens that can be out of your control. I've gone through 3 VA's for green guy in Samus and still on the hunt! I might just cut all dialogue for them to only grunts at this point!

Future Collab! Edit: AAU got too busy

Shh, don't tell anyone this but I've just entered a collab with AnAlternateUsername!
https://www.deviantart.com/analternateusername

There are also 2 writers, Evannakita and McDead.
This is going to be damn epic!

We've all just started talks of what to do this morning. (It's a Godzilla girl rampage vid with LOTS of destruction!)

Personal Update

So after Yoko released, GV and I were so hyped about that and then planning for all these things to work on like really short videos in VR and maybe some wallpaper stuff for character polls, converting old vids into VR, (Did NOT go well) working on a Marin script redo after we learned so many things on finishing "Kaiju Club" episode 1's script, and then finishing Samus sound with voice actors, and then the Ms Marvel short vid for testing out the gravity collider physics thing in which I have to do a tutorial, etc...

As expected, I kinda burned myself out a bit when trying to put it all into focus of what goes next. I don't even know where to start with the wallpaper idea anymore or if it's even gonna be a good thing to focus on.

So the past 2 weeks was me taking a step back to think about something else because of all the tough things 3d animation threw at me as well. (Especially trying to learn destruction and hair physics in so many ways that took forever only to learn that they wouldn't work)

And so to focus on my art style for 3d, I tried picking up drawing. The goal is to eventually be able to shade correctly like a painter and then hand paint normal maps onto characters because I sure as hell still don't understand tutorials for the regular face normal adjusting method for a year now. I just want to paint it on rather than go through 15 different steps. Plus, it's necessary for the concept art style I want. Anyways, anything to take a break from thinking 3d stuff but still be useful.

I've been using drawabox to learn and this is my first WiP drawing. It's gonna be of giantess Calliope Mori. (I absolutely fell into that Hololive hole and she's the reason why)


I used TONS of references and kitbashing with a bit of tracing to learn so it's not all original, but it's a fine outline start and I want to do her justice too. But holy shit are hands hard!

In other news, I didn't leave my 3d projects sitting. This entire time I've been waiting on voice overs for the gang in Samus. In which there is now 1 left.
Ms Marvel's voice over is already done!
But surprise! My old sound editor, Blank, wants to come back and help me with sound fx. Hell yeah, because sound editing is so dull to me! (Some cool parts though. Still not too fun mostly and it triggers my ADD hard when thinking about getting back to it)

I gave him all my sound libraries and told him to do sound for Ms Marvel. Let's hope he does well because that will be a nice speed boost if I can just get back to animating.

Meanwhile on Marin, the models generally are low quality, so I asked TalesofScale to remaster them a bit. (Which will take time)
GV is also on break after how much we've been working on "Kaiju Club" and he wanted to redo Marin's script so...
Speaking of that, we will have to be doing 5am meetings all month for the episode so we can meet with the Storyboarder who lives in Australia. The modeller for Kaiju Club also becomes available this month.

Man, this month is gonna hit my sleep schedule hard, but the only thing I can do now that isn't waiting on somebody else is the Gravity Collider Physics tutorial. I'll start there.
Then uh...
. Samus VO comes in then finish it
. Blank finishes sound that I gotta check, meanwhile I can compose for Ms Marvel
. Try to find time to talk Marin with GV on the script redo and then begin storyboarding as I wait for Tales' remaster of the characters. (Seriously, Marin's feet are terrible quality as well as other things like textures)
...
Other than composing, there's a lot of waiting here. I should probably figure out an animation where I don't need to rely on anyone. Or I could continue to learn drawing too. So many choices...

VR Quality Update

First, I wanted to say sorry about the VR quality. I thought it was just Adobe rendering at a lower quality in the preview BUT NO. That's how it came out!

So after some more testing, I've found that my Yoko VR version has such shit quality that I went back into UE4 and re-rendered all of it in 8k.

On top of that, I've researched into Adobe Exporting some more and found that my settings were absolutely terrible for quality. Ruining an already standard definition looking 4k. (Because it's like a 4k screen that's super zoomed in and stretched all around you)

These settings seem to keep up the quality super well in my tests. Previous ones were just export and go so this will be 99% better. (Especially that max quality 2 pass bitrate. That's gonna be slow but worth every pixel saved
Edit: Actually that 2nd pass didn't make much of a difference)

Well after discovering Deo VR to help test everything officially so that I know what i'm doing, A new YokoVR vid is SLOWLY rendering from Adobe. But on top of this, i'm deciding for the future that vr vids will be in 180 degrees instead of 360. All that 360 stuff is pretty much exhaustively swiveling your chair around to look while 180 can give the benefit of moving the camera again without making the user too sick and yet still immersive. On top of that, it can keep quality much better because this 8k 360 vr rendering is gonna take at least two days. Plus, barely any video players can play that quality smoothly right now. (It may look WAY better on youtube though on the 4k setting now)
So if I can find a way to make 4k look good and be lighter than 8k's 798 GB, I'll take it.
But if that 4k test STILL looks just ok and not up to what I think it should be, well now i'm much better prepared to render in 8k to fight off youtube and adobe compression for 4k viewing.

Ms. Marvel Soundless

This render only has very small issues and one physics problem where the umbrella fell a little bit more than it should've during the render. (Never did that before, naturally)

So this is SUPER CLOSE to getting done! I gotta add tags and adjust a few things.

Also gotta try rendering in VR.

WHOO! EXCITING!

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I'm really proud of this one! Featuring the gravity collider physics where I suck at collision settings but it got the job done. (Her scarves)

I'm doing lots of stuff with cinematic lighting and aspect ration. This ratio is the same used in Jurassic Park 1.85:1. Which has the usual top but extends to the sides JUST a bit to make the vertical bars there to draw your eyes in. It makes things feel EXTRA big because of this effect even though it's nearly the same as 16:9!

Other than that, facial bone animation is SLOWWWWWWW, but it gives SO much better expression than shape keys. I plan on using pose libraries next time to speed up the process.

On top of all this is that I recognized this to be VR compatible since there's no cuts in the animation!

Currently, i'm sending this to Monstrassa so she can provide a quick Voice Over.

Finishing Ms Marvel Today

With or without music, I finally have everything here to finish this and get it up tonight.

Monstrassa re-recorded the lines and they're SOOO much better! I also turned on raytracing for this so that the buildings have great reflections of her!

A 180 VR version might be interesting to render. But then because of how much she moves all over, I wonder if I could have most of the video be the same camera movements from the original just expanded with stereoscopic rendering? Worth trying out to see if I get sick.

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So uh Blank, the returning sound editor I was excited about working on Ms Marvel, got positive for Covid-19.

I told him to go straight to a hospital and I'll do the Ms Marvel sound fx. I hope he gets well soon and it doesn't affect him too much, but he's already going through some symptoms.

Then TalesofScale is NOT doing well and I hope he gets what he needs from the hospital as well. So GV is gonna step in his place for voice acting the green guy in Samus vid. We're gonna try live directing for the first time to see how efficient that could be.

I'm gonna try to blast my way through all this so I can get working on Marin. But yeah, that's rough for them.

Oh! Marin. That got worked on and closed up. Because so much of the island was already shown in Diane's vid, we're cutting all that adventuring back and i'm gonna focus on the best house growth destruction ever! Will still have that good beginning but it's gonna be a much shorter video due to the crazy big Kaiju Club getting progress in the background. Plus, we want to get to Morag REALLY badly.

And so now there is much work to do!

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While other things are going on in the background, i'm going to break new ground and test out Limited animation humans with full animation giants. Featuring Amber and Jean!

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Working bones for facial expressions is gonna take a bit to learn. It's far more effective than shape keys but it does take a bit more time.

In other news, I need to be control the way the cloth physics work. Man, I feel like it's luck most of the time but I know i'm doing something wrong with the collision. This is just inexperience working with Blender physics. I probably need to not use cubes attached to bones but more like a lowpoy body? Or study how rigid bodies do their thing? Capsules? Idk right now.

In other news, I can stream at earlier times again!

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With the Gravity Collider physics 100% working, learning to work with physics has been a whole new process for me. Always had to use manual animation.

But now it's time to finish the ending of the animation so I can start polishing it up and doing facial expressions as well as character lighting.

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Now I know what you're thinking. "Why on Earth are you working on this?"
I needed to figure out how stretching works for characters to see if the method I find out would work for the hair physics I recently created since those bugged out on Yoko in UE4 whenever they stretched according to the bones.

I'm also learning more cinematic lighting even though this doesn't use the cel shader. At least the video is only 30 seconds! Phew!

Live Wallpaper/Short VR Loop polls

So I was thinking, since Yoko VR vid kinda took long and I'm about to start Marin, what if I did something actually more rapid-fire and would actually merely take days instead of a month to do? (Not abandoning full VR vids at all, just trying to get content out during huge vid works)

https://youtu.be/CP6ayOD0d7I
My Queen Persona 5 vid didn't have much going on but it was really fast to implement.
Potentially, it'd allow me to use a lot of characters people want to request.

So the question is if there's interest in something like this and what kind of characters would you like to see? (Also, need a 3d model to use of them)

*Watch this turn into short VR loops

Yoko VR Done (8K Upload)

This should be MUCH better quality than the previous final version. Although I can't get youtube to not put out an error once selecting the 8k option. Odd. But the 4k looks MUCH better!

Edit: Microsoft's Edge browser allowed me to play the 8k version. BOI did it chug. But I guess that's just future proofing for ya.

MEGA Link just finished if you can even get 8k to run. I'm gonna work on a 4k download soon:
Download: https://mega.nz/file/qGACWZqb

Key: 0zzZggyW739KmotrfNkMRDdeRMi6u-O2jXT4lBG2ezI

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Okay NOW I removed the floating stuff. After what feels like weeks of rendering a pain in the ass, i'm ok with this being final. Even if that wood piece is right next to the camera on the 2nd floor as Yoko nearly outgrows it, it adds to the claustrophobia in a way. (Couldn't cache the destruction at all in this video so it was always luck how it would occur)

Here's the new MEGA link:

https://mega.nz/file/aThDRAZJ

Decryption Key: #TLgaI9NF_YL0GQRFKD1dDIrJiT9fsB2iucFmBms0d5Y

If there are any issues, please tell me. I edited this with Adobe Premiere and tested it in there too with the VR mode. Idk any stereoscopic VR players to download at this time so I'd love any suggestions for that too.

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I fixed everything! HOORAY!
Except for that floating table. damn it!

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These VR tests take FOREVER to render because i have to check so many things and let it mostly go all the way.

But after making the VR camera smaller and the zone thing, it's now actually ready enough for a good viewing experience that doesn't make your eyes get crossed.

Things I need to fix:
. Remove all bloom and re-adjust lighting
. Figure out what's up with the disappearing body parts at the corners of the camera.

Once I get this figured out, I'll swap this out with it.

Yoko nonVR Final

THIS version is finally finished. The VR version?
I came across unexpected issues with Adobe not rendering in the framerate that I need. On top of that, half of the video has the camera inside Yoko's body instead of just beside it. So I'll have to re-render the whole VR thing again. Yay.

But still!
I'm happy to get this version completed! Enjoy!

Yoko Soundless

So this is the version before I put names and fix a few final things and add sound. I'm doing this because it's taking too damn long.

I'm gonna finish off Samus sound since I have the VA work in, then i'm gonna finish sound for this! ... I think! Sound for this could be faster since there's no music and it'd allow both render versions to be done maybe next week to stay on Patreon for a month and then Samus sound would be worked on during that time.

The hair physics were good but the 'stretch to' ik weren't compatible with UE4. So next time I try it, I gotta use the regular ik and hope the hair bones on the character aren't completely wacked out like Yoko's here. Had to manually animate the hair for the whole video.
But then Kawaii Physics plugin for UE4 REALLY came through!
All that jiggling and bangs were done by it! Although an issue I ran into is that the collision capsules built in it don't scale. I THINK I can animate that within the AnimBlueprint.
But yay! Now my characters won't feel as static anymore when it comes to breast jiggle and smaller bangs!