I can promise Vici isn't trying to milk anything. I think it's really just a gap between perspectives that we aren't able to articulate well enough to bring together.
TLDR Fischl is 6 of our most complex animations, just combined into one huge package. That's why it's taking us 4-5x longer than one of our 3-5 min animations, and why we are planning to return to 3-5 min animations.
The core concern from what I'm understanding is that Fischl is taking a year. Not actually the speed of our work, milking, stalling, etc, just the total time from start to release. With speculation of milking/stalling being extrapolated from that one metric. The speed of our work is an important piece of context though that helps clear up why the total time is so long for Fischl.
As we addressed our speed of animation has been a pretty consistent 1.5-2 mins of animation per month for a couple years. That hasn't really changed so far. Ei x Miko was actually a little slower than that because of the complexity of 2 full motion bodies and Mona x Slime slightly faster due to simpler animation we could re-use but that's our general pace for everything else.
With that in mind Fischl is progressing at exactly the rate we'd expect. No faster or slower than most of our works, even though it's more complex and with much more custom animation than we've ever attempted before. Custom animation takes 2-3x longer than looped animation for us, for context.
At 1.5-2 mins per month, a 20-24 min animation like Fischl should take us 10-16 months from best case to worst case. It's a lot, but that's the issue with long duration animations. We also took a couple short breaks totaling about 2 months for Succubus Hu Tao and Ganyu x Keqing in the middle so it should be closer to 12-18 months.
Realistically there's not a lot we can do to boost our raw production speed without just adding more people (with some diminishing returns and/or creative conflicts), or lowering quality a bit. We'll become slightly faster over time, but for us that just means we can pursue more complex and interesting results rather than churning out the same things again just a little quicker. Now we do have some plans for improving our workflow a little but the risk is too high mid-project and would take time to convert our current project structure. So we're looking to the next ones to try them out instead. Even simply updating Blender midway is risky, as we found when some shaders broke in Ei x Miko near the end and we had to roll back.
Back to the gap between perspectives, it seems Fischl is framed as one slow animation over a year from the outside looking in. For us however it's more like 7 or 8 animations. That being Succubus Hu Tao, Ganyu x Keqing christmas, and Fischl on its own being the size of 6 of our full animations in our typical 3-5 min range. Fischl isn't slower, Fischl is simply bigger. Too big, but we've already addressed that and talked about our plans to return to 3-5 min animations in the future until we can develop and sustain a bigger team if and when that time comes.
I'm confident that if we had released 6 animations at 3-5 mins instead of Fischl there would be no speculation of milking, stalling, etc. Since it's really just the pace of releases, not the actual pace of our work, that I suspect is the heart of the concerns. Fischl is just being looked at as a single animation, and compared to our earlier works that are simpler and only 1/6th the duration, without extrapolating the time it should take given the vast gap in run time and complexity. Going back to some lessons learned I mentioned in the last post, if we had started Fischl today we would have simply created it as 5 or 6 smaller animations instead of one big one.
But for as much as I can explain our pace and how the math still works out for the video duration, in the end we have patreon members in our discord frequently dropping into our near daily streams. They see with their own eyes what we're working on, ask questions, offer suggestions and ideas, etc. They can see with zero doubt that not only is there no milking or sandbagging but that we're each pouring 6-12 hours (sometimes more) 350+ days a year into our work.
Animation is simply a labor of time and creativity. We could cut some corners and pump out lower effort work much faster, or switch styles to shorter form loops and abandon the storytelling and dynamic scenes that push our skills, but that's not the vision we have for these things. We do have to cut back our ambitions a little to avoid 20+ min animations for the time being but we don't want to compromise on our vision beyond that.
I hope that helps give a little more insight into where we're coming from, and why Fischl has been such a huge effort for us. If there are some more specific concerns or questions I can do my best to try to answer them too (˵^ ◡ ^˵)❤