Collection Video ViciNeko collection [2024-10-27] [ViciNeko]

4.30 star(s) 6 Votes
Discussion Reviews (6)
fartbruh

fartbruh

Newbie
Mar 6, 2022
35
35
KitsuneEcchi said:
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 (˵^ ◡ ^˵)❤
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You're great kitsune, ignore everyone who tries to rush art. The only question I have so far is the difference in WIPS over the year. The initial ones had stockings and what not but now she looks pretty nude in the newer renditions. Did you guys just decide to take it off, or are you planning on rendering multiple versions?
 
Krosh4703

Krosh4703

Newbie
Jul 19, 2021
35
38
More importantly, is there a chance they'll finish the whole thing by Christmas?..
Seems unlikely at their current pace.
 
Joshy92

Joshy92

Devoted Member
Mar 25, 2021
11,293
24,989
One of the best creators around
Plus who doesn't love seeing girls have fun with tentacles & slime?
 
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burryniceuser

burryniceuser

Active Member
Jul 23, 2017
595
1,025
Unfortunately it looks like we won't be getting a Succubus Hutao this year unless they're keeping it secret.
 
C

cudasaurus1

Member
Jun 15, 2023
313
578
molitar said:
He released another 5-10 second clip on 11/4 for it..
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They release a 10 second clip every week. So monthly 40s of animation for over $100k a month. They're incentivized to drag it out given they're paid over 10x more than an average professional industry animator while doing no work.
 
BloomYourDreams

BloomYourDreams

Member
Mar 1, 2020
474
314
Quality/style seems higher(if not highest imo)/appeals more to me than an average professional industry animator's, so I WANNA MO. Visible crowdfunded platform imo suits better/fairer for artists than a salary formula, so more power to em.
 
trazz

trazz

New Member
Mar 5, 2019
2
5
I wonder what would happen if everyone would finally understand that they are getting ripped off and unsub
 
L

lyzergnature

Newbie
Jun 28, 2020
93
159
In the amount of time aanix released so much more at so much more quality

It's so obvious they are pulling a studiofow here now
 
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4.30 star(s) 6 Votes