LordAardvark

I thought that three animation layers would be sufficient for the IK rig upgrade for Love and Degeneracy Episode 2.

However, I need a correction layer, too.

Decided to just go for 5 layers.

Here is a video of the extremely complicated process involved in changing the number of layers from 3 to 5.

Decided to put together a Demonseed mood poster of the sisters.

While the series focuses on Galwyn and Nal-Azoth, Veryna plays an important role as well.

Also, isn't it odd how, despite "bastard" referring to any child of unwed parents, you rarely see "bastard daughter"? It's always "bastard son."

Currently cursing my director of photography for all of these full-body shots in Love & Degeneracy Episode 2 that need to have their grunts, moans, and exertions lip-synced.

(It's me. I'm the director of photography.)

Find yourself a demon queen who can pin you back by the shoulders as she rams her 12-inch demon dick between your thicc thighs the way Nal-Azoth can.

The thought occurred to me that, now that I have the structure for Micros hammered out, I should give Demonseed another spin.

We'll see how it goes.

For today's stream, we are going to resume work on the Generic Hitman Females.

My two major goals for today are to at least get one outfit built for them (the Fallout 4 Vault Suit) and to start work on the tool for properly randomizing them.

Come join us! picarto.tv/lordaardvark...

Episodes as well! You can check out Episode 1's subtitles right now on Patreon, as part of its Early-Access release.

Otherwise, once they release publicly onto the Series page, they will have their subtitles included.

Fun fact, if you watch the teaser on the Series page, accessible from the links across the top on my website, there are subtitles.

LOVE & DEGENERACY - CHAPTER 1

A 17.5-minute series spread across 6 episodes. Every two weeks, a new episode will be released. Watch them FOR FREE on the new SERIES page of my website as they come out.

Episode 1 is AVAILABLE NOW on Patreon, as well as full WIPs of the series.

I love loading up old projects. You never know how exactly they're going to break.

Are models going to become unrecognizable eldritch horrors? Are the outfits going to be a bit goofy? Will SFM just immediately crash to desktop?

It's a wild, untamed world, and there's only one way to find out!

This is the major reason why I haven't released the new Animation Layer system yet - I want to spend time with it hands-on, find the friction points and the bugs, and smooth them out before a public release.

I've been so busy with infrastructure work these past weeks, I would've missed this one.

Turns out, it wasn't an error with the Swapper at all. It was an error with the Animation Layers IK rig.

Specifically, I wasn't constraining the model's root to the IK rig's root. The eye target is constrained to the model root, so the eyes drag when the rigged model is moved.

Fix? Flip a flag. \2

While I was testing the Model Swapper tool I wrote alongside the new Animation Layers IK rig, for updating the old IK rigs used in Overbreed, I noticed that the eyeposing got completely mangled.

I thought it was an error with the Swapper.

It's not a big deal, easily fixed. But still rather odd. \1

Also, in case anyone is reading "12 chapters" and thinking "that's not a short story at all!", I feel like I need to point out that the title is a pun.

It's a short love story, as in a love story between short people. Both Marie and Honoka are under 5'0 / 152cm. The story is actually quite long. 🤪

Across the series, Honoka weaves in and out of the action, though her primary role is as director and emotional support.

My VERY high-level outline takes the shape of somewhere between 10 and 12 chapters. Honoka starts getting directly involved around chapter 4, ramping up around chapter 8.

I think I have the Micro system done.

I need to do some last-minute look-overs, make sure there's no obvious landmines my 1AM-brain has overlooked. But otherwise, it all seems to work.

If all goes according to plan, though, we could see the Love and Degeneracy release cycle begin on Friday! 🥳

Just as a general update, the first episode of the Life is Strange Micro series is ready for release.

What's holding up release now is I am bodging a new page for Micro releases. Due to their short size and regular releases schedule, I don't want them cluttering the main Films page.

Current WIP.

Got a lot of foundational work on the Generic Hitman Female done. Here is an early release. The tool hasn't been written yet, so you have to do everything manually.

Six face textures, six hairs, five bodytypes, one head shape, zero outfits.

Download it here: files.lordaardvark.com/Assets/Proto...

Hello, everyone!

For today's stream, we're going to take a bit of a detour, and build a new generic female model.

The Mass Effect one is okay, but I've long wanted an equivalent to the Generic Hitman 2016 Male. So why not a Generic Hitman 2016 Female?

Come join us! picarto.tv/lordaardvark...

The ultimate intent of the new Animation Layer system:

Updating the character models in Overbreed to have animation layers. Because I REALLY don't want to do 70+ minutes of destructive detail animation if I can help it.

I plan to release the Animation Layer system and the Swapper in a few days.

Similarly, the core rig declaration was respectably reduced.

The original Valve biped takes 252 lines of code to define a unique IK rig.

The previous Animation Layer system reduced that to 46 lines of code.

The new Animation Layer system cut it even further down to 32 lines of code.

Not bad imo.

The new Animation Layer system, with all its dependencies, is now smaller than the original Valve Biped rig.

The original Valve biped rig is 443 lines of code.

The previous Animation Layer system was a mammoth 689 lines of code.

The new Animation Layer system is only 369 (nice) lines of code. \7

While writing everything, I found a lot of things the Valve rig does that I don't think it needed to do, and caused the rig to be really unstable and crash easily.

Removing all of that allowed me to cut 200 lines of code down from the previous Animation Layer system, and it's much simpler now. \6

This is fine when just snapping handles directly onto bones.

But abstracting things out to allow layering, especially for handles that don't snap directly to bones (like elbows), it causes fundamental problems.

It took a lot of trial and error to figure this out. Had some funny results, though. \5

Sparing you all from a boring technical writeup, all I'll say is that the fault lies in the fact that SFM constraints all have a "maintain offset" flag which, if set, will keep bones where they are when constrained.

The entire Valve rig is hard-coded to make it impossible to set this flag. \4

It was more an ordeal than I wanted, but the original Valve IK rig was so deeply rooted in a fundamental fault, and my Animation Layer system built atop that Valve rig only further convoluted, that it ended up being faster to rewrite it all than try to patch the fault out of the code. \3

Fixing that problem ended up requiring me to completely rewrite the entire thing from the ground up.

Not just the Animation Layer system, but the entire IK rig.

And not just from the base simple IK rig, but from first principals.

Only 25 lines of code from the Valve original IK rig remain. \2

The other week I previewed my new Animation Layer system with an animation of Heavy.

One may have noticed that his pelvis never rotated in that preview.

That was because the system had a bug where the pelvis handle would spawn in the middle of nowhere. Rotating caused a wild orbit.

I fixed it. \1

A third Diffusion Furnace has hit the Discord.

My Discord community is truly one of a kind.

I share a screenshot from an Asianometry video and make a bad joke out of it, and this happens, entirely unprompted.

I love them all oh so much.

It seems my feeling better on Friday was the calm before the storm. This damn head cold slammed down on me hard on Saturday, worst I've felt all week. Today is better, but not by much.

I tried streaming an episode of Dispatch yesterday and it near exhausted me.

Gonna play it safe. No stream today.