Precious Little Left

Since I want Precious Kouhai finished by the end of the month and I've kinda been neglecting working on it to get started on the Maids & Masters guide and trying to finish writing the chapter for Divine Intervention, so now those two projects need to be set aside so I can focus on PK.

 

With the commitment made more to the release date than the amount of content, PK v1.0 is basically entirely written and only needs to be animated. I'm still dialing in how exactly I want to work on animations to find a good balance between quality and speed, but that's exactly what I started making PK for.

I could easily spend most of a day working on a single animation even using all of the time-saving techniques that I've learned, doing little tweaks and fine-tuning the movement to make things look as good as possible from as many angles as possible, but I do feel I eventually hit a wall in terms of diminishing returns. 

Granted, I don't want to just maximize speed and be sloppy, either. Especially when the animations are intended to loop, any flaws it has become more obvious with every loop that goes by. Making a loop that's less than a second long can make that problem exponentially worse, since you see that many more loops in the same amount of time spent looking at it.

 

As much as I want to believe the characters and narrative are the most important part of a story - and they arguably are, and they'll remain my top priority - it's a bit foolish of me to take the stance that people will look past the visuals in what is ultimately a visual medium. I want to at least put enough effort into the visuals of my future projects that the average person won't disregard or lose interest in whatever the project is because I've put so little effort (or it appears that I've not put very much effort) into the visuals.

 

Unfortunately I still have some obstacles that need resolving before I can get the full benefit of my updated software (the broken teeth texture continues to haunt me), but the main thing is that I'm continuing to improve, and the bulk of the improvements that came with the software updates are still being used, even if it's not to the fullest. Between that and PK being fully written, my hope is that the animating that's left to do will go relatively quickly and the rest of my February will be nice and productive.