WEEKLY POST - February 23rd 2025 - Animating Elena

Hey guys!

Been feeling a bit under the weather this past few days (I tried not to sniffle too much while recording the video, but it's clear that I caught something).
So, full disclosure, and contrary to prior expectations, I'm not quite finished with animating Elena's sprite.

I thought I'd show you in the video 'how the sausage is made', as I put it.

Basically the above picture is the base-generation, and picture below the modified version on Photoshop:

I modified nearly every aspect of the base generation to cut it into over 60 different layers, isolated locks of hair, eyelids, lips, choker, everything, so that I can animate it. That alone is a soul-crushing process, and a lot of the time, I will redraw some things by hand (most notably what's below a part meant to move).

The next step happens in Live2D, which is the same software used to make the Vtuber personas. Examples of Vtubers that come to mind if you're unfamiliar with the concept would be IronMouse, AmaLee or BuffPup (check Youtube).
Those Live2D models are light-years ahead of what I do, and likely cost thousands of dollars to make by specialists.

Anyway, in the video, I also spend some time showing you Elena's sprites from the game's v0.8 and v1.0 (which I call Elena's v1 and v2 sprites, while I'm working on her v3 sprite - I know, it's a bit confusing, sorry) to illustrate their respective strengths and weaknesses, what I've learned and what I'm trying to achieve:

There's a lot of trial and error involved. Some things I did in v1, I might try to re-do in v3, while getting an overall quality superior to that of the v2.

For example, I want the eyes and mouth to be expressive, easy for me to use when animating (which I feel was a thing I achieved in v2 of the sprite) while being able to have more extreme expressions (which I couldn't do as much in v2). So I'm testing things to get there.

I'm also getting a lot of experience as I work on it, and you can bet that once I get to the NSFW FMG sprites, shit's gonna be wild, yo! The existing ones are some of my oldest sprites, so I'm fairly excited to apply some of the things I've learned since. I have a lot of things I wanna do better on that front.

Anyway, I have a little poll for my fellow Hobz & Gobz about Elena's hair, but that'll be it for this week! Imma get some more tissues.

Have a nice Sunday! Cheers!