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Progress Report - October 17, 2021
🕑 Added 2021-10-18 06:54:09 +0000 UTCHowdy everyone.
So I am making this particular Progress Report public, since it doesn't have anything explicitly lewd in it, and I want to use it as a sort of public announcement.
First things first, no progress on Overbreed. The first half of this past week I wasn't feeling particularly great, and I ended up using my working time pursuing side-projects. Which is what the bulk of this post will be about.
Zarya x DVa
Off the top, if you've read the Overbreed Episode 1 screenplay, then you probably realized that this post's preview isn't at all related to Overbreed. And you'd be correct. It's not. I have long since personally shipped D.Va and Zarya, and over the past few months I've been slowly exploring ideas of them together. This week, I finally decided to start prototyping, starting with what I consider to be the biggest "pillow zone" of the entire idea.
The "pillow zone" is that space in a project's life where things are entirely untested, and if something goes wrong, I will just quickly smother the project with a pillow and move on with my life. The "pillow zone" here is Zarya's walking animation: anyone whose been around for a while likely knows that walking has forever been my greatest Achilles' heel. I do everything in my power to avoid it, even going so far as spending a dozen or so hours building an entire support system to allow me to import walking animations and bypass creating them myself.
I tried to do that here, by puppeting the TF2 Heavy's animations onto Zarya. Apparently the Heavy doesn't actually have any walking animations (only running animations), and their proportions are so wildly different it didn't work. So I had to build Zarya's walk animation entirely from scratch. My pillow was within clutching distance.
Against all odds, though, what came out is hands down the best walking animation I have ever made. I made it all entirely through intuition - no references at all - and all the animation you see is all first draft, with no revisions or refinements on any of the placements, rotations, or pacing.
I am supremely pleased with how this came out, and I am considering the project past the pillow zone. This is still just a side-project, so don't expect frequent progress updates on it. It's something I'll put an hour into every other night before bed. Slow and steady is the name of the game.
As to content, expect a lot of wholesomeness. DVa and Zarya are a bonafide couple in this project, complete with nicknames for one another ("Little bunny" and "Mama bear", you can figure out which goes to whom). Hugging, Eskimo kisses, giggling, and cute awkwardness are all abound. Also huge futa cock, because I can't help the fact I like my Russian muscle mommies having giant cocks and being too shy to use them for fear of hurting their smol partners.
Blacklight Projects
The bulk of this past week's work, though, has been spent on Blacklight projects. What are Blacklight projects, I hear you asking?
After sitting on (and exercising) the concept for months now, I finally decided to go public with it. Which is rather humorous, because when you read the explanation on what Blacklight projects are, you will discover that Blacklight projects - by definition - cannot be spoken about in public. So I am going public about the existence of things that I cannot go public about.
Nevertheless, I put together a string of Tweets describing the concept of -light projects, focusing on Blacklight projects, earlier today. You can read that thread here, and you can read the description of what Blacklight projects (and other -light projects) are here.
So, what all Blacklight projects have I been working on? I don't have anything concrete yet, just been doing a lot of exploratory animating, and a lot of hemming and hawing on whether or not I should be spending my time on these. Some of the characters that I have been exploring for Blacklights are Lulu; Anna and Elsa; Barbara Gordon and Selina Kyle; Claire Redfield and Jill Valentine; and a certain pointy-eared Princess whose IP owners are extremely draconian and literally caused me to lose my original Tumblr account back in 2015.
As with the Zarya & DVa project, these are all side-projects, meaning they only get an hour or two of work put into them every few days. Overbreed is still my primary focus. And unlike Zarya & DVa, since these are all Blacklight projects, I can't be open about them. I can verify that they exist, in vague terms, but I can't be a smartass and snake around describing what they actually are.
The way Blacklight projects work is they either die in silence, or they release without fanfare. By their nature, I produce them at a guaranteed loss (they can't be paywalled to recoup their production costs), and they don't get publicized. If any of them do get released, they get a single Tweet dedicated to them and an entry on my website, and that's it.
The Next Few Weeks
I want to say I will be returning my focus to Overbreed this upcoming week, but honestly, I don't think that will happen. I have a Blacklight model asset that I have been putting a lot of effort into, and I think I want to finish it up and release it before I get back to Overbreed. I've put a lot of time into it already, and I am quite happy with how it's come out, but it's a big project with lots of parts still to be built.
Hopefully by the next Progress Report, though, I will have that done and sorted, and I will be able to return to Overbreed. We'll see.
Sorry I don't have more productive news to report. Unfortunately, time is far more finite than my creativity and my interests. To work on one thing, other things must necessarily be put aside. And this past week, my attention's been pulled so many different ways that Overbreed ended up being the one put aside.
I won't lie, going public with the existence of Blacklight projects has lifted a burden off my shoulders though. I can't talk about them specifically, but I can at least acknowledge their existence. And I suspect that for many of you, especially the long-time fans who came from my old Lulu video and other similar content made around that time, these Blacklight projects will be a welcome addition to my portfolio, and you will be more than satisfied to hear when I make progress on them.
That's all I have for now. Until next week, everyone.
Comments
Lord Aardvark
Patreon doesn't like people circumventing its policies with Discord, so none of the Patreon-tied channels, like #wips or #misc-bin, would get any discussions that wouldn't be held here. The open-to-public channels like #aardvarkian-productions and #aardvarkian-rambling would, in theory, be more open to it. But I think Discord separately has policies against some of this content (honestly need to look it up), so I wouldn't hop into the Discord eagerly expecting extensive Blacklight discussion while having no interest in anything else that goes on in the server.
MisterMaus
Will discord posts be more open about blacklight or is that hush-hush too?
