Aftermath

Didn't know there was a preview-/download-limit on Google Drive ... I did a quick search, but it's pretty hard to find any numbers of what that limit actually is. It also seems like each file has its individual limit. Weird. I'll post an alternative link to mediafire as well in the future.

Anyway ... surprise update!

Here's the Google Drive download link and here's the alternative download.

Video to come

Alrighty, a couple of things:
The Mass Effect animation sucks. I didn't do a clean job when preparing everything for animation and now I'm stuck with a mess of unnecessary layers, corrections, counter-animations and on top of that an incredibly slow viewport, which makes it hard to get an idea of the final animation. I may quickly wrap up what I have so far and release the unfinished clip some time, but right now I don't want to bother with it.
No reason to hold the Alexstrasza animation back then. Unfortunately, after everything was rendered, I noticed that the cum was acting all weird ... basically it was glittering ^^" So I made some tweaks and am re-rendering the last part. Once that's finished I'll post the whole clip.
Until then here's a blurry gif =)

Update: Download it here or here.

Been working on the bloodelf some more, made some adjustments to the nose and added realistic ears. I'm curious if your reactions will be the same as with the nose =)

Teh faec

Making some progress on the animations and found the time to work on the new bloodelf model some more. It's still far from finished, but I applied a quick texture today just to see where I'm going. In case you're wondering, I haven't made any changes to the hair and eyebrows and the body doesn't have a proper texture yet.

Although it's looking okay for a test-shot, a few of the concerns I had when I started, came true: She's not looking as much like the original character as I'd like her to and as expected, a simple face-swap doesn't work at all, so if I wanted to use a different character, I'd have to make adjustments to the model itself. Especially the latter could prove problematic when it comes to rigging and skinning ... I don't really want to redo those as well, each time I switch characters :|
Anyway, I'll continue and worry about this later.

Teh belf

The whole cumshot thing is starting to get really frustrating. I'm struggling to find settings that result in a cumshot that looks good, moves as you'd expect, is easily transferable to other scenes and doesn't take like 50+ hours to simulate. I'm making progress, but it's much harder than I thought :|

Anyway, while waiting for the preview-sims, I worked on overhauling my first model. Unlike previous improvements, where I would just work directly on the original model, I now made an entirely new model from scratch. My goal is to create a model that looks like the original one, but simply has more detail. After finishing the rough overall shape, I started with refining the breasts and slowly worked my way upwards. Right now I'm working on the nose ... the rest of the face is still work in progress.

From left to right: the original model - my new model - my new model smoothed out and stuff.
This is fun! =)

Cum's coming

I'm in the process of finishing the last step, before beginning the fine-tuning: the cumshot

This is just a test-shot for me to get an impression of the final look. The cum is looking a bit too watery right now, but it seems like I'm on the right way.

Keeping you posted

Hi,

I'll just drop a quick copy&paste of stuff, I posted in my thread at darknest:


Mediafire finally locked my account, which means pretty much all video-links should be dead now. I still have no idea why, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to take any chances and just dump my stuff on a new account only to find it deleted again. Shame really, I liked mediafire :|
4shared looks great, but it requires a registered account to download stuff, which is a dealbreaker.
One click filehosters usually have a download limit, which is also a no-go.
If anyone knows of a great filehoster, please let me know.

I've been looking at a bunch of tutorials to set up rigs, that ultimately should be easier to animate and, more importantly, be extremely flexible. For instance, applying an existing animation to a new character would be much easier and should look better. I could also create some animation presets to use as a base to work on for future animations, thus greatly increasing productivity. As a bonus, those rigs could easily be exported for use in various game-engines, should I ever feel like creating something interactive.
There's a big downside, though: that rig works very differently than what I'm used to, meaning that the animation-process will be very new to me and I'll need some time to adapt. In my experience, the saying "never touch a running system" usually holds true, but in this case I'm willing to take that risk, seeing how great the advantages are. Commissions will remain closed until I get the hang of those rigs.

I'm making great progress with the Alexstrasza-scene. Except for the faces, all animation is finished. When I'm done with the faces, I'll be working on the cumshot, background and lighting. After that I'll be wrapping up the Mass Effect animation. If by the time that's finished as well, I don't notice any major flaws in any of the scenes, I'll start rendering everything. No ETA at this point, but here's a little preview-shot: