What's To Come

So i'm sure you lovely people have noticed production of videos have been pretty slow, theory videos stopped, and so did top 10's for the most part. With YouTube low ad revenue we started moving on to other venues for income such as sponsored creators positions, but the main reason besides a lack of funds or interest. is because we've found something we do care about. We've been working on animation and all kinds of nifty code that helps us do said animation. 

it's taken about two years, and has costed in the excess of probably $10,000 - $20,000

That being said the research we've done won't simply be for us but could be used to really kick start home animation

Vtubers are pretty popular these days, do you enjoy them? 

well you're welcome... okay okay so i'm not the only one that has helped in that department but i've seen more than a few using resources i either publicly or privately fund, solutions i've put out there etc. though I've kept a lot private.  a lot of the code base i use is open source any how but it feels more dramatic. 

So what have been up to? 

Well we have live motion and facial capture for one.

that's the raw mocap before we go ahead and actually clean it up. That's where we get to flex our skills for fine turning finger motions etc. also there's no colliders at the moment so hair phases through the body

But we're jumping super ahead here. 

While it's a blur of sleepless nights and head aches it did start almost two years ago and we were far, far  far from this

now doing motion capture became easier around 2016 there were plenty of start ups offering suits for a few hundred dollars. of course after their kickstarts that shot up to a few thousand.

and limited if any support.

and even facial capture had a meriet of choices. 

the most obvious being face rig .

Looks promising right? 

WRONG.

while yes face rig does offer some usability and even full body capture, the logistics of porting models to it horribly documented and expensive in both time and funds.

first of all you need to buy the studio version of face rigg,  about 400$ then model work is in the thousands. after that you do need to buy a licence to use it for profit. sure we could not buy it, but it could cause issues down the road that aside it just didn't look right. 

being some one of a mocha complexion a lot of camera based stuff doesn't work well. there's always some glitch or another, and fine tuning the face capture was something i spent the longest on. 

I went from product to product, finding two main solutions.

both used expensive depth cameras and gaming industry level software. but those came with price tags in the tens of thousands of dollar range... oh wait i'm sorry i mean hundreds of thousands annually since the previous number was monthly. and believe me i tried to crack the software for months. 

it used codemeter which is the most infectious piece of shit I've ever dealt with. i eventually got it to run on a virtual machine which was not easy due to the demands of the program. 

but it again didn't really work how i wanted it too. but it was something, and lead to our first beta rigs 

Not the best look... but at the time i thought hey it might look cool.

It was at this point i realized. artist and other people you work with. they aren't always worth what they charge. and that sometimes, you do need to refuse to accept shotty work... a lesson i of course learned after working with a studio for months spending hundreds of dollars, because i mean come on you don't want to be that guy?

Of course i tried to mitigate it by getting them closer to my vision by partnering up with thedeamonfox at the time to sketch out an idea of how it all should look

This did not turn out well at all. even more so when i tried to actually motion track it. take a look at the free model i got versus the paid one. for those of you who tuned into test streams you'll remember her. she's a converted MMD model

I gave up for a while, it was pretty clear that what i was doing now was just... not good. 

But eventually, i went back to square one researching for nights and nights solutions finally finding some that i'll keep secret here.

needless to say, the fire was lit once again!

of course this time i'd design a better character, and i know now how people will just go on the internet and lie on resumes in order to get jobs (shocker I know)

first step was redesigning the character and boy, that went horribly horribly wrong. it wasn't even close to what i wanted or requested. 

Yikes, not only did it just design wise look like shit, art wise it was far beneath what the persons portfolio had. this is advice to anyone, but a lot of times people will give you sub-par work compared to what they can do, just to see if they can get away with it. don't let them. 

this person ignored my design so i firmly yet politely informed them as such, detailed how it was wrong with my own drawn examples and plenty of arrows. 

and eventually we got to my actual design here.

Is it gay, very. but it's my gay design. and i'm proud of this flaming borderline furry fucc. 

After that i started looking into fine tuning the facial capture even learning Xcodes to do so, buying a mac since it was cheaper than building a hacintosh and a few months later bam

pretty neat huh? 

it's ridiculously easy to do, now that i know how to but before error after error propped up, learning an entire other coding language etc. 

Then i said why stop at just having a white background? freak it, let's add a room! 

because i didn't feel like i spent enough time and money on this project already 

Pretty freaking awesome right? i like to give artist some freedom whenever working with me. because i know for a fact that if i micro manage everything, it will end up wit ha George Lucas effect. of course i did remove some elements when working on this to avoid clutter. (also god damn it i'm not sombra, i was made before sombra went public, but you'll see tons of sombra Easter eggs in the pictures)

That being said the modeling was done, and the next step was lighting... i had no clue what i was doing here. the lighting always felt off. so i hired someone to do it... for like 500$ because i'm dumb. they charged me for ten days of work and did it one, and put up 3 light sources, and made the textures look like shit. i still paid them because i didn't learn shit, until i came back a few hours later after consulting professionals and noticing he straight up just didn't do my requirements. tried to go through paypal to get my money back, they declined so i just went with my bank and got it all back. One of the artist i actually was talking to whose a student actually struck up a deal to correct the mistakes for rights to use it in a portfolio and to pay what ever i felt it was worth. 

here are some test renders 

there's a lot I skipped over here, it's hard to put 2 years into words. but needless to say i'm still not done, and will be working even harder!

but i think i'm to the point where video production is possible. 

you guys have been a big help, and i can't stress it enough. sure i don't get thousands here but some of you have been here for years and i appreciate that. 

Well until next time!