Progress Report 20.04.2025

Hello!

As promised, I wanted to shed some light on things going on behind the scenes - the constant struggles that haunt me to this day.

TLDR: I’ve mentioned a lot of details, but in short, my standards are dangerously close to outgrowing my productive pace, and as much as it hurts, I need to notch them down a bit. At the same time, I believe I’ll get better at this so I can work faster. I will keep trying out different things to find the best way to resolve it.

When I started working on the update, I mentioned new camera work and poses I wanted to focus on. It felt really good in the beginning. The scenes felt more alive than ever. The characters were not only moving their heads when talking, but their whole bodies too. The presentation started to feel like an actual anime.

The significant issues started to arrive as soon as I decided - I can improve it further.

I got a new app, started learning it, fixing the most visible Koikatsu shortcomings, like contours. The more I used it, the definition shifted from fixing shortcomings to meeting the bare minimum.

It wasn’t about fixing anymore, it was about improving.

It’s hard to look at the same models again, seeing those weirdly cut, potato-looking feet, or breasts, or... and so on.

Now.

The new camera work required me to basically redo the additions in new app every single time a character moved. The dynamic poses? Made it even worse. So as you can imagine, the amount of work insanely skyrocketed.

I tried a lot of different things to make it work, but skipping all the technical details - I ultimately failed.

I abandoned the idea of dynamic poses and camera work.

Then I realized it’s still an issue xD.

Sure, whenever there are dialogues and characters can just move their heads here and there, it’s not that much work in comparison to the things I described.

But I don’t want my characters to stay static throughout the whole scenes.

So when characters move, they require different angles, and the app work still becomes a behemoth of a task.

And listen to this.

When I worked on these dynamic poses, I realized how much of an impact they have. I’ve talked about this, but I don’t want characters to just look believable when moving - I want them to look good while doing it. So now they do, on every single render. But once again, setting the nice-looking poses became the bare minimum, which just became the last nail in the coffin.

I’m in a very weird spot right now - that’s why I didn’t want to talk about it last week. I still don’t know what the best way to go about it is. I think I need more experience with this situation, keep thinking about resolutions to get the best from both worlds. I might leave app work for the end of the week, so I can get into the flow better, rather than meeting a halt after each render.

The story progression isn’t bad because I’ve reworked the dialogues so they can support a smaller amount of poses, but at the same time - I miss them. So yeah, I still need more experience and time for all of it to marinate.

I hope you understand my perspective, even though it probably sounds like schizo talk to you.

Anyway...

Here’s what I’ve done this week:

• 40+ renders
  
  Thanks for reading, and until next time!