Next Frame Preview!

The focus of v0.8 is going to be on upping the stakes of our NPC interactions and adding a fun new frame (and written content to go along with it, of course). v0.7 seems nice and stable, so I'm getting to work on new content right away!

[NOTE: Patreon has some language filters to catch Onlyfans style porn posts, so I'm going to be a little circumspect with my descriptions to avoid any accidental flagging.]

Unlike my recent work on NPC art, where the general style was already decided, this frame had a bunch of different ways I could have approached it. After spending some time doodling my different ideas over a screenshot of A Very Full House I settled on this classic directly-side-on view. There were a few key factors that made me settle on this view:

• It avoids any tricky perspective effects from having things get closer/further away from the viewer. That will make it much easier to animate, which in turn will give me more time to draw and animate specific effects.
• It provides an obvious, classic X-ray view. X-ray views are stupid hot in my opinion, so I consider having one mandatory.
• A long, narrow frame allows me to keep all of the relevant action visible while also leaving space for other frames to be shown to emphasis different body part motion.
• Putting the torso out of view saves me from having to draw torso specific elements (like shirts, bra straps, etc.). Again, this saves time that I can put into other more impactful bits of drawing and animation.
• Putting some of the face out of frame goes a long way to hiding my general weakness at drawing faces in perfect profile. It also cuts off the eyes, which I am planning to add in as a separate, head-on eyes only frame (which I think will be more generically useful, and have a little more impact when it's shown).

With the pose picked there was still a bunch of details I needed to figure out, like "how large does her mouth need to open" and "how should I split up the model"? To address those I slapped together a quick-and-dirty drawing in GIMP with my best guess, and then modified it to get each of the segments you see in the preview. This turned out to be very useful, and I think I've got a solid plan for how to draw and rig the model in Live2D.

Next up I'll be doing some high quality lineart and shading, then I can bring this design into Live2D and rig it up. I hope to have a preview of that in a couple days time!