Vexorum meets Andre - Preview images

Hello everyone,

Here's an update on the animation of Vex and Andre. I'll code-name it 'Box' for now. As well as a more general update.

In short:

- With your support I have obtained a nice environment asset set. Thank you!

- The animating is progressing, have some renders.

- I'm exceptionally busy, because of reasons.

[Box]

I've got about 500 frames of animation close to ready. I'm really trying to make the movements better than my previous work. Which means a lot of adjusting and re-adjusting, and re-re-adjusting, and so on. For the first time ever I'm working with an actual quality environment. And! I'm animating two dragons instead of one. Normally, I'd say that alone would make this animation take twice as long. But because Andre's rig is... let's say, less than straightforward, it'll take me a bit longer. (Especially those wings! Oh god those wings...) Nevertheless, I love to animate, and here are some render, just for you!

You may notice the environment doesn't have any color yet. This is being worked on by a different artist, at the same time as I'm doing the animating. It goes a lot faster that way. I wish this animation to be SFW, so I can post it to the largest audience. But Andre is Andre. He's got his part and he can't hide it. So far it's not been very visible in the animation. But I'm not sure it'll stay that way. Also, when things start getting huge, I bet I'll want to make some NSFW clips. Perhaps they will end up as part of a separate video? I don't know yet! We'll see how it goes when I get there. You will be notified! :D

[More General - Money Units]

In case you haven't noticed, Patreon has changed its payment system. I'm not exactly sure what it means for supporters and for supportees. (If that's not a word, it totally should be.) I've heard several people were somewhat displeased by the changes. Personally, I'm not worried. As long as you folks can work with the Patreon system, I'm a happy camper.

Now, I'm not depending on your support for my cost of living. And so I vow to spend your coins only for the purpose of improving my animations. To this end, I'm keeping a detailed log of exactly how many coins I receive in support, and how many I spend and on what. (To my mind, this money doesn't belong to me. It belongs to you, my supporters. And I'm handling it on your behalf.) Every once in a while I will post this log for you to see.

[More General - Busy]

During the past few weeks I haven't done as much animating as I had wanted to and it has several reasons. One of those is that my regular work has been exceptionally busy. This is because we're approaching the year's end. Most of the coin-managers at work have been very careful not to over-spend during the year. Now that the year is almost over, they notice they have under-spent their cash and they'll have to return anything they haven't spent before January the first. So like mad they are now demanding features, updates, and engineering capacity. Planning is hard, didn't you know?

[More General - Bug]

A good chunk of time has gone into resolving a bug in my rig. The bug caused my arms to glitch in certain situations, slowing down the viewport playback thereby slowing down animating. And causing erroneous frames during rendering, reducing the render throughput. It's a bit technical, but I will explain for those interested. I have found a way to work around the issue and so it won't be slowing me down any longer.

The arms contain 3 joint-chains: IK (inverse-kinematic), FK (forward-kinematic), and result (the joints actually driving the geometry). The IK and FK joints drive the result joints. A blending node structure is used to smoothly switch between the two. In certain poses, the IK solver gives unusual results such as rotations of 3528376 degrees. These kinds of values end up clipping to infinities which result in none-numbers. Needless to say, this screws up the blending and geometry math quite royally. The workaround is simple: Animate the IK controls even when driving 100% on FKs, just to make sure the solvers don't spit out any nonsense. I love this kind of stuff. Can you tell?

Thank you very much for your support. It'll be put to great use!

Thank you very much for reading this update.

Take care,

 -Vexorum