{SHORT REPORTS} Yoruichi - July 18, 2026
Hey everyone! Here's a short report!
My days have basically turned into Groundhog Day. If we ignore basic human needs, my routine looks something like this: I wake up, sit down at Blender (mostly working on the animation with Yoruichi, while also learning more about non photorealistic rendering). Then once night falls I switch over to playing Yakuza 0, and before bed I watch a couple of episodes of an anime or TV series. Wake up + repeat. And honestly? I'm really enjoying it.
BTW its my first game experience with the Yakuza series. Somehow it completely passed me by until now. I'm having an absolute blast playing this game
If I could just fit regular workouts into this routine it'd be perfect. My work life balance has finally settled into a place I'm happy with and its holding up surprisingly well.
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A short story that just happened:
I'm writing this report for the second time. Why? Because while I was writing the first version, I had a render running in the background, and suddenly my PC started making incredibly loud and very unusual noises.
And at that moment I literally shit my pants.
I shut it down immediately, but I still haven't figured out what caused it. I do have a few theories, though. Now all good with PC.
Remember when I mentioned doing cable management? Unfortunately, the cable management turned out to be the worst idea.
After I reorganized everything, my apartment lost power twice, and both outages happened right after I started a render on my PC. My guess is that I bundled or squeezed the cables too tightly. Once I loosened about half of the tangled cables, the power issues disappeared.
So I can't say for sure, but I think I need to redo everything I did. I'd really rather not have my PC suffer a heart attack and die halfway through working on an animation especially considering I often leave it rendering overnight. Anyway.
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Back to Yoruichi and our journey toward the more intimate scenes.
Right now I'm working on the intro sequences. They're probably the least exciting part of the project for you, but they need to be done. So, what's changed since the last report?
I've gone back and polished the scenes from Intro 1. There were a number of things that bothered me, and I've fixed many of them. Some others I've simply accepted as they are.
I know I have a tendency to fall into an endless cycle of tweaking the same tiny detail over and over without actually improving the animation as a whole. I'm actively trying to fight that habit and teach myself to move on.
So now I've full end Intro 1.
There's one scene I probably won't include in the final animation the part of Yoruichi flying over the city. It just doesn't look good enough. Here's a frame from it.
Now let's use Shunpō, leave Intro 1 behind, and move on to the biggest opening sequence in the animation Intro 2.
I put together a storyboard to help myself figure out what I want to show in this section and how to bring the two main characters together. While doing that, I realized Intro 2 was becoming a little too ambitious, so I started cutting a few scenes. Right now I'm trying to find a balance between making it interesting and keeping it from becoming too long or too painful to animate.
At the moment, that's what I'm working on.
I've already animated the first scene. The editing isnt final yet, but I'm really happy with how the background turned out.
As for the cat's coloring in the Bleach anime, if I remember correctly, whenever Yoruichi was in her cat form, her body texture basically used only two colors(black and gray) regardless of the environment whether she was standing in sunlight, shade, or anywhere else.
I'm not sure if I'll stick to that approach throughout all of Intro 2, but I want to experiment with it and see how it looks.
Here's the rough version of the first scene from Intro 2. Video in the header of this post.
After that, I started building the large environment where the rest of Intro 2 will take place.
Here's the current version.
It's far from finished. I still need to improve the lighting and add a lot of smaller environmental details. For this preview, I quickly placed a bunch of low-poly buildings, but I expect many of them will be replaced or redesigned later. Once the environment is ready, I'll move on to animating the entire intro sequence.
Since this report ended up being late, my completely real and absolutely existing schedule of short weekly updates (pretend it exists) has shifted. So the next post will be a Monthly REport.
Starting next month, though, I'll try to post updates roughly every seven days. Do we believe that'll actually happen? ...I don't.
That's all for this update! Stay healthy, and have a great day! See you!