This month has been one of conflict for me and my team, I don't like to presume but I've seen the same reaction from everyone when we settle in the 'meat' of a project where, for all intents and purposes it doesn't seem like a lot is getting done.
That's not to say we've not been hard at work, it's just you get things changing from awesome to, even more awesome-er I like to hire people that demonstrate a remarkable degree of passion, it's how our work, in my opinion, stands out from the rest, when you have people who are, not creating for the sake of a paycheque, but because they want to see the end result as much as everyone else does.
It's why films and media that spend years in development stick around in peoples minds, it's how you get the Arcane's, the Into the Spiderverse's, the Severance's.
I can't compare our work to those masterpieces (yet) but it's the standard that we aspire to achieve.
The disadvantage is that, if, as an artist, you don't feel like you're doing your part or you're holding someone else back, it can be demoralising! The passion that we have is a double edged sword in that sense, for as much as it drives us, that drive can't be turned off.
I mention this now as the bulk of the work we've been carrying out this month is a process called retopology, For those outside of the business, it's the act of taking the absurdly high poly sculpts that flow from the minds of our artists and make them into objects that preserve the detail, but make it so it can be rigged and animated without bringing every modern computer to it's knees, Basically reducing the amount of points the computer has to consider when rendering the finished article.
It is an extremely time consuming, but necessary part of the process when it comes to developing assets, given that we are now moving into a space where, the assets we make are likely the ones we want to keep around for some time, we're spending more time than ever getting them just right. Given the length of time spent on this set, and also some feedback from some members, both here and on the discord, we've decided to spend a couple of episodes in this new setup we've been crafting.
The idea being that the next episode should be dramatically quicker to produce, and also lends more time for our modeller to get working on the next set whilst I work within the same environment.
It also allows us to explore a couple scenario's based on what people have said they'd like to see in this environment, Denial verses reward, the details of exactly what will go down will of course, remain a surprise for the final product(s), but rest assured, we have been listening and are always considering how best to explore concepts and ideas within this universe.
With that all said I can say that the body and facial animation for the scene is all but done. The runtime of which is going to come in between 15-20 ish minutes (final cuts are always made for levity's sake so nothing firm currently)
There will be some polish needed, as ever, but we are at the stage now where the mocap and animation process is becoming very efficient, which is excellent news for when we have a sufficient set of environments and devices in which to.... delight our various participants.
I'll leave you all with a write up I asked INOPRBL to do for us about the new rebreather design he's been working on as part of this set:
The Rebreather The Deep Extraction Unit utilizes a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR) to provide a carefully-controlled breathing mixture to the subject, held in a self-contained breathing-loop.
The primary function of the rebreather unit is to remove CO2 from exhaled breath and replenishing the O2 which has been consumed by the body, but it also serves as a distribution system for advanced mind-altering compounds used during operation of the DEU.
This unit is designed to operate in mixed environments, both wet and dry, and can be used across a wide variety of applications.
Rebreather Operation:
Exhaled breath is a mixture of CO2, O2, and an Inert Gas, such as Nitrogen- which acts as a Diluent.
Exhaled breath travels through a hose into a Counter-Lung, which briefly holds a full tidal-volume of exhaled air before it is pulled through the loop by the Inlet Air Pump. This ensures that even under maximum workload and stress, there is never any perceptible resistance to exhalation.
This unit is equipped with both an inlet and outlet Air Pump, which effectively eliminates the “work of breathing” concerns of traditional rebreathers, by carefully balancing inlet and outlet pressures in time with the subject’s breathing.
After passing through the inlet Air Pump, the CO2 in the exhaled breath is captured using a pair of adsorbent beds; essentially a kind of filter which can trap CO2 molecules, and then later release them in the presence of an electrical charge.
The O2 and Diluent pass freely through the adsorbent media, but CO2 becomes trapped within the sponge-like material.
Trapped CO2 is further processed after capture, stripping away the carbon and allowing oxygen molecules to pass back into the loop.
The adsorbent beds take turns cycling between capture and release states, absorbing incoming CO2 from the breathing-loop, and releasing it into the CO2 cracking unit to recover the remaining oxygen molecules present in the CO2.
The air mixture in the breathing loop is now a combination of O2 and Diluent, which then passes into a Mixing Chamber that allows the blending of additional gases and vapors.
Connected to the Mixing Chamber is a computerized aerosolizer unit with an internal magazine of various compounds such as Aphrodesiacs, Euphorics, Stimulants, Narcotics, Performance Enhancers, etc.
The Aerosolizer distributes these compounds into the Mixing Chamber at a precisely calculated rate to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of the various drugs in use.
The onboard sensors in the Deep Extraction Unit provide telemetry to the computerized controls of the Aerosolizer, allowing it to make realtime dosage adjustments while in use.
The primary addition valves for O2 and Diluent also connect at the Mixing Chamber, where they can be carefully blended before passing through the loop.
Once past the mixing chamber, the gas is monitored by a series of sensor within the Outlet Sensor Head, the last stop before passing through the outlet air pump and into a counter-lung, which stores enough breathable gas to compensate for the tidal volume of the subject during periods of maximum work and stress.
The gas is then inhaled, where it enters the body before being exhaled and starting the cycle over again.
In the event of an emergency, where the breathing-gas mixture in the loop cannot be maintained at safe levels of oxygenation, such as after an equipment malfunction, this unit is designed to automatically switch over to an Open-Circuit bailout system that can provide breathable air to the subject from a pressurized air source connected to the DEU.
It is in these outlets and shreds that I see from the team I've had the distinct pleasure to work with where the passion shines through, It makes me think that if he puts this much effort and thought into a mask, what lies for us in the future?
TLDR: The Kiri episode is rendering as I type, by the numbers it will be doing so for the next 4 days, allowing me a couple days to do my post processing and final touches, this should drop sometime next week (I'm aiming for Thursday)
With that said, I wanted to talk today about where all your money ends up!
Believe it or not, I'm not actually buying a yacht with it!
This project represents the first true 'all hands on deck' situation for me, It's the first time that an entire production has started with, and been worked through by multiple members.
So along with paying the growing team of passionate individuals (all of which are equally as excited to see this vision rendered) a lot of it gets spent on hardware.
New computers, graphics cards, hard drives, that kind of thing, I'm going to explain why this is so helpful, by talking about cum!
Simulation for the nation
I spent about 2 weeks of this month running fluid simulations for this scene, When I said before that you should all expect a scene like Mercy X Aimee but messier, I meant it!
That sounds like a lot of time, and it is! But when you consider I was using a whole new system which I had to learn the ins and outs of... well.. it's still a lot of time!
But honestly, that's just simulation in general, it is a tedious, yet necessary part of productions.
And when I say tedious, I mean tedious, below is an example of a FLIP simulation baking in real time:
Just so you can understand the numbers here:
The simulation is running on a 13900K, the fastest possible processor for this job
That gif represents the time it takes to see the result of a single frame of calculation
The simulation -will- slow down the longer it goes on, due to the amount of particles in the simulation increasing.
This is for 234 frames of simulation with an extremely small amount of fluid.
This is a system I've been using for many years now, a lot of the fluid dynamics in a lot of my productions were made using it, so I'm pretty good at it at this point, I've had a lot of practice.
But even with that level of experience, a simulation will almost never turn out well on the first try, you almost always have something to tweak to get it to look right.
So suffice to say, considering some of the simulations in this scene go on for thousands of frames, this was not going to work.
I like to think I have an extremely patient supporter base, but I think even you guys would get upset if I told you all I'd be waiting another 2 months on this project! (I did not pull that number out of the air, it's literally how long it would have taken)
So, things had to change. Enter fluid particles. By comparison this is a much larger scale simulation running, with 10 times the particles, on 20x the scale:
Awesome right!? But this is simulation, Simulations still go wrong. They go wrong a lot So, you're always going to have to iterate, and at the length of time this sim goes on for, it was taking about an hour to an hour and a half to see the results of each sim.
The solution? run 3 iterations of the simulation with different values at the same time, across a networked set of computers:
You'll notice those move a lot slower, it got a bit more complex as time went on!
In the end, in a single week, I was able to complete something in the region of 150-200 iterations of the simulation until I found the settings that produced the result I wanted
Well, actually the result I wanted was Version 47, but I ran about another 20 after that just to see if it could be made any better.
Overall, the fluid particle system was a wonderful addition to my arsenal, and the time I've managed to turn this project around in is a reflection of the level of investment that's brought us this far
Without the support of you all, I would never have been able to afford all the devices that make this kind of stuff possible!
It is my hope that, if this continues, we can only continue to make better and greater things. As competent as this system is, I have made contacts that are going to enable me to start using Houdini for my simulation needs, and then we're going to see stuff on another level entirely!
With that said though, this production really is on another level from my previous works, we are finally starting to see the return of the investment that I've been building on for the past few years!
Light her up!
Another decision which, may not have been as popular is, This production could have actually been done and released by now, the timing was such that it did have an, albeit slim, possibility of coming in just under the wire.
What ended up costing us was the addition of volumetric lighting, It is a very good looking, but also very costly addition to the rendering process.
Just to put it in perspective, these are frames from different stages of the animation, all of them are to be considered WIP (even the one at the top of this post)
This was the first lighting setup I was going to go with for this production, at this stage this would render in about a minute per frame (17,175 frames, 3 computers = about 4 days)
I got some feedback that the light direction was a little boring, so I twisted it a little, messed with the range and added some cut-out sections of it, at this stage it's still taking about a minute per frame.
Then volumetrics came about, speak to any 3d artist and they will know that volume is an extremely costly, but also extremely beneficial addition to how real a scene feels. Just this level added 30 seconds of render time -minimum- to each frame (that makes the render take 6 days instead)
Nice right? But we can do better here at MJP.
This final adjustment, along with some additional tweaks pushed the final average frame render time to 2 minutes per frame (8 days rendering total)
Soooo yeah, that's why I missed my deadline at the end of last month, I think the results speak for themselves though.
But I said 4 days at the top? how come it's going to be done that soon if it was going to be rendering twice as long?
Well, I bought another GPU, another thing I was able to do, because I have so many of you supporting us.
If I'm being honest though, I made a lot of similar decisions during the production of this piece.
The whole, get content out fast VS realising your own vision of the scene debate is one that will run through the minds of any independent artist living upon the whim of thousands of generous strangers.
It is taking a measured approach, and spending the extra time that resulted in the production looking the way it does now, and I sincerely believe that, that's why you're all here, to see the finest quality pornography that exists.
Until I release my next piece of course!
I leave you with an image of some frames in motion from the animation.
Please bear in mind this is a screen recording/crop of a small section of the frame before any final post processing, it is also a GIF which are low frame rates, the final production moves as smoothly as any of my others do: Bye for now!
I'm going to recount the events as best I can that we went through this month as development of the scene continued, there's quite a bit to talk about!
Week 1: The Audio
To begin with, after careful review, I found I wasn't able to make the original voice work I'd had done work with the scene.
This was disappointing, but I'd had a gut feeling on an initial review that it wasn't going to fit, I had no complaints about the standard of it, It's just one of those cases where my vision for the scene didn't match the VA's interpretation, this is just something that happens sometimes, after a couple panic attacks about it, the first order of business was re-ordering voice work.
Enter Sultry Lamp who, after providing a sample which,1 if I didn't know any better, was just clipped from the actual Kiriko intro cinematic, delivered a wonderfully sensual, erotic, detailed and engrossing performance which slotted right in with how I saw the scene playing out.
At the attachments at the bottom you will find a WIP Mp4 which has audio in it for an example of the work, it truly is a fantastic performance, and has been a pleasure to work to.
This was resolved quickly, but it cost me about a week before I could really get started, as the entire animation is based around the audio performance, the new audio had to be delivered, cut, and prepared for use, this cost us the week.
Week 2: The Environment
I turned my attention in the meanwhile to establishing the environment layout. I ended up with something that had a rough idea of the space and shape I was going with. But to call it basic would be being generous:
Several hours of fiddling with this, and a growing impatience to start animating was distilling my attention here, luckily my editor managed to step up and take on the job for me, He was able to continue work on that, building not only this environment, but a modular asset pack we can use on all productions moving forward:
I seriously can't overstate how much better this guy is at this stuff than I am
It is thanks to the support and patience of my supporters that I'm able to not only attract, but pay this kind of talent. I can delegate the task to him, pay him a fair and living wage to do so, whilst I turn my attention to the area I'm best at:
Weeks 3 & 4: The Animation
This is the first time I've returned to a female (genitalia based) participant since Mercy X Aimee, and I wanted it to be -good-. Mocap and a decently thought out character rig promised that possibility, and thus I got started
We start with a mocap take, in this case, I've captured and transferred (after some adjustment) the movement of the hips and shoulders onto the character:
Yeah you're gonna have to deal with the creepy dead eyes and no head movement for a little bit here, it gets comparatively worse before it gets better!
Next we add breathing, the mocap setup is not accurate enough, and it's not really practical to get this kind of movement in a mocap scenario, so this is always a manual process:
It's not straightforward either! Here I'm finding the beginning and end points of the breath, then adjusting the curve based on the aggressiveness of the motion, we tend to breathe in steps, IE you release the breath rapidly at first, and then slower as you expend the air volume, likewise in reverse, you tend to sharply intake the volume at first, then fill the remaining volume slowly.
Especially when you're being assaulted by variable, precision applied pleasure.
It took about 2 days at 10-12 hours a day to get the breathing pacing done for the entire production.
This starts to make the motion feel a lot better! But I felt there was more that was needed to tie it all together, thus I created a controller which I then used to add a variable state of tension to her body:
The idea is this key allows me to adjust globally a few values which make her more tensed/at ease, so it changes a few things, raises shoulders, brings elbows in, tightens thighs, angles the hips, pops her abs out.
Another couple of days and that layer is then added to the entire timeline:
At this point I can consider the body animation pretty much done, it is devoid of the proper physics based responses, but for the most part, this really ties the entire body motion together.
Thus it's time to animate the things that are causing her to writhe so:
After another couple anxiety attacks at the scale of this job, far more robust rigs then I'm used to working with made this task fairly trivial, albeit time consuming, as it's a very curated, artistically driven motion. The feeling I wanted for the arms was to commune precise, but organic movements.
Worth noting at this stage that this doesn't feature her skin reactions to the arms, which is something we're going to tackle at the finalisation phase once I'm done with all the key animation, more on this later.
Next up, as I'm sure all of you have noticed, no mask on her, this production has mouth animation, voice lines and such, thus, facial animation is needed!
Now this is the first time I've worked with facial capture, my initial use of it felt a little bit underwhelming honestly.
Looking from the outside in, it would be understandable to think that mocap is simply a case of strapping in, recording the session and slapping the result onto the model. As is probably pretty clear by now, it requires far more curation and adjustment to make something that looks good.
Head motion is an interesting one, this attribute is tracked by the suit, I even did another separate take of the entire scene just to capture it, but you never know what direction you should turn your head in at a certain point, because you can't really consider how that's going to look until you have your angles all figured out, thus animating this cannot be anything other than a manual job to look it's best.
Luckily thanks to my technical lead, I have an excellent rig that allows those kind of adjustments on top of the facial capture:
This is easily the most time consuming phase of the animation, but as is hopefully obvious, absolutely necessary to bring the entire motion together into a cohesive whole.
It's this stage where I embellish the little details, fix anything erroneous, and really just polish the animation. This includes animating the head, eye targets, and making any adjustments or corrections to the mocap and lip sync.
The facial mocap adds an excellent base, takes care of a lot of the timing, and once curated together with manual animation, really sends the facial animation to a whole new level, Strange isnt it, that on it's own it doesn't seem like that much!
And whereas this process is normally the most time consuming part (you can polish forever), it only took me a week to get halfway through polishing the entire 12 ish minute production to this standard, which is pretty incredible honestly, given this scene has a lot more facial animation in view at any one time than any previous production I've undertaken.
Previously it would take me an entire day to do maybe a 20 second shot to this standard. The facial segments of the previous Brig animation took me 2 weeks to complete, and that's not even half of what I've done on this piece already.
At this stage this shot is pretty much what I'd consider key animation complete, There is a physics pass that my technical director will be adding, which will essentially provide the skin reactions to the arms, along with jiggles in the right fatty places.
Some parts though are extra jiggly, so they benefit from a little live wiggle:
Boobtacular as it is, there remains pockets of fat that would really benefit from extra jiggle, and a skin simulation would also sort out areas that are not being tackled correctly currently
Once I'm done with the key animation for the entire production, this layer will be added, along with all the rest of the parts that need simulating, mainly the hair, and the chairs cushions reaction to her body/head movements.
Be sure to check out the attached mp4 which has sultry's -decadent- audio performance, and also plays in 24 fps as opposed to the embedded GIF's in the post.
The Conclusion
So I spent a lot of time on this update because, I was very aware of the fact that it's been a while since everyone's seen some new content from me.
I also slipped into the old habit of making estimates on timescales, whereas this is a skill I've proven to be very bad at in the past, I hope that shedding some light on the production process goes some way to explaining why the nature of these long format productions is so prone to unanticipated delays, and why estimating things is far more challenging then it might seem.
I lost a lot of time overall doing everything but the part I'm best equipped to tackle, this is something I am going to take steps to improve as we move forward.
In my endless pursuit of perfection this production represents a landmark moment for me in many ways; I am finally getting -close- to exactly what I see in my head when I imagine these scenes, the models I'm using are properly optimised and the environments are going to be better than ever. it is extremely exciting to see unfold and I am incredibly excited to share it with you all when it is ready.
As excellent a job as my technical director did preparing this model for me, it is still one based on limitations, as good as this model looks, it will pale in comparison to the standard we're working on, let us look to:
The Future
I can't honestly talk about this and accurately communicate the level of passion for this project my technical director has, so I asked him to write a few paragraphs about what he's working on right now:
One of the biggest hurdles of 3D animation when aiming for humans with realism is the uncanny valley that most rigging methods will produce!
Single use, linear shape keys serve as patchwork solutions and substitutions for properly placed joints whilst contributing to file size bloat, many models are built on spaghetti solutions built to tackle problems produced by a lack of anatomy knowledge.
Big movie studios resort to muscle simulations when making realistic creatures to help take away that uncanny valley by literally simulating how the human body works in real life.
One of the best examples I can give you why this workflow comes in useful is James Cameron's: Avatar
Only one Navi was made with the inner skeleton, muscles, veins, etc… From that one base they were able to generate all the different Navi characters!
Most people tend to believe that blender being free is incapable of such rigging but this couldn’t be further from the truth! Blender has everything needed to create such a rig.What we are currently working on here at MJP will hopefully help people finally believe it is totally achievable with the right approach and a shite load of research & development!
Like any muscle simulation, we need a good accurate skeleton to drive the entire setup! Since humans are something most of us are used to looking at in films & in real life, there is a lot less room for creativity than doing a dinosaur or creature for example! I’ve downloaded and bought quite a few human skeleton assets just to be disappointed with how most of them are not very accurate unless we spend a fortune on them! Also not a good idea to go dig up a grave just to 3D scan one either hehehehe! So in this particular case, the best possible course of action was to take the time to study every single bone as madly detailed as possible to recreate an accurate sculpture of the human skeleton, as close to medically accurate as possible with the available references without going completely nuts on details!
Since the skeleton is used to simulate skin sliding on bones, muscle anchors, muscle sliding on top of bones, tendons, veins, fat and such, I needed to make sure I knew exactly where those muscles and tendons needed to sit on the skeleton! So I painstakingly studied every bone to have as many of the major bone landmarks as possible so it can be as accurate as it can be! So the idea is fairly simple (simpler than making it hehehe!): make an accurate skeleton model that is usable for animation, rig it with a fairly complex rig that allows you to change the shapes and thickness of the skeleton bones directly with the armature bones as opposed to using shape keys, allowing us to modify the underlying structure to fit whatever human character we need.
That also allows for better muscle placements as well as anchor points but also to allow the rig to be as flexible as possible while still giving us the ability to modify the overall look of the character but also to maintain complete animation control over motion capture! Not going to lie, this is a LOT of work and sculpting this skeleton was very challenging but also very rewarding! Now doing the retopology and yes, it is just as challenging! We’re taking the time to do it the right way and we are very proud of its progress!
Jeannot (Jano) Landry Aka: Blender Pirate Technical Director @ MJP
So when's it coming out?
When it's ready! More news when it's available, bye for now!
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$3,000.0
THE GOAL REACHED!
Yeah I know, it's a big one, but realistically this is what I'd need to quit my job and do this full time, it would no longer be a hobby and obviously bring a significant reduction in production times.
$550.0
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This amount allows more robust outsourcing of jobs in the production cycle which will help bring timescales down, including things like sound engineering and editing.
$250.0
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This covers my monthly costs for VA work, subscriptions, addons and outsourcing where required. It won't eat into the deficit but it will ensure I do not need to compromise when it comes to these facilities, meeting this should bring down production times.
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