Why and How PN has been created ? -part 1-

As a fan of hentai art, specially hentai games (but not Visual Novels or RPGMaker games, even if I respect their creators, art style and the time they spent on their creations), I decided to give it a try.

I learned basics on Blender few years ago, modeling standard objects, for fun, to learn important notions, such as perspective, correct scaling, texture mapping, etc...

Behind the game

• Modeling the game

The tavern has been made in one go. Almost every object currently displayed on game has been premade with the tavern, as an individual mesh of course, but as full part of a single tavern file.
Few objects have been added later, but at the beginning, I knew in my head exactly where each room, each object had to be placed.
All I had to do was to create it.

Here's what it looks like when opening the file :

• Character creation

This was the worst part for me. I'm not skilled enough to make credible characters, so I trained hard to learn how to make good ones, in 3 different styles : Pixel 2D, "doll" 2D (with separated body parts, linked with bones to animate them), and 3D.
Unfortunately the results were very poor.
And then, one day, VRoid came out of nowhere. I tried it, and I realized that this could have been a good alternative, to compensate my biggest weakpoint.
At this point, I had to find how to convert .vrm files so that the character mesh could be displayed and modified in Blender.
Once I had the solution, all I had to do was to customize even more my VRoid creation, "Yua", in order to correct conversion & base conception defaults (such as missing seams, or polygons that aren't connected at specific points (fingers & phalanges, for example), leading to too much visible imperfections.
At first, Yua was made totally naked. I really wanted to make her clothes myself, so I learned how to create some, and I made the textures according to what I had in mind.

Here's how Yua Looks like on Blender, with visble bones of her body and clothes :

• About other characters

Every other character in the game have base models owned by VRoid public creators. According to their terms of use, I choosed few ones which alteration was authorized, in order to apply specific hair, cloth colors, etc...
Nocturne is the only exception. Her base model is Yua's, but with a customized skeleton, no default face morphs, and handmade hairstyle.

• Global Animation / Hentai animations

Contrary to popular belief, animation is not that hard. It takes time, of course. But once you understood how frames/keyframes are working, you've done 60% of the learning process.
From what I know, there are 2 basic animation methods in 3D : processing bone by bone, or using Inverse Kinematics (IK). Not very confortable with IKs, which slightly deforms the base mesh when not correctly configured, I've decided to make every single animation bone by bone, including Hentai ones.

• what happened to 3D hentai animations ?

While handling a single character animation was easy, this were not the case for 2 characters at once.
Each one has its own skeleton and it led to coordination issues.
I chose to fuse everything : meshes and sekeltons, to make only one entity.
This was much more easy to handle, and even if I had to manage male + female animations simultaneously, results were very satisfying, very close to what I wanted to make.
Everything was going really good, and I was very confident about it. When the work was done, all I had to do was to convert my blend file + animations to FBX.

...and this is exactly HERE that troubles started.

Once the mesh has been converted, some parts of both bodies appeared heavily deformed, looking like tentacles of "Cthulhu".
"Yua and the Director's nephew" did not looked like "Yua and the Director's nephew", but more like "absurd tentacle orgy".
I checked on the internet about heavy mesh deformations after conversion, and few answers says that apparently, I forgot to do something really important before starting animations : apply position/rotation/scale of the fused meshes, making all my work, all the time spent, good for garbage.

Discouraged by this huge loss of time, I chose to try something else :
What if I try to make sprites from what I've done so far, in order to not lose my work ?
So, that's what I've done. I saved 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 frames of each animation (depending on the total frame of each animation), then assembled all the frames on Photoshop.
This led to very few pixel gaps between some frames, but I managed to correct almost everything.

I'll tell you more about integration on Unity later. I hope I've been explicit enough. ;)