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Description
Very basic story here. On the way back from a cheesy summer horror flick, a guy involuntarily transforms into a feral lupine-form werewolf in front of his girl. Paralyzed by grief and fear, she looks on helplessly as his humanity slips away under the full moon. His last coherent thought before surrendering to the whims of the beast is that they should maybe have caught the matinee showing instead.
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Some comments about the animation:

When doing these animated sequences, I’ve found that it’s easy for me to put in at least twice to three times as much time tweaking the models and poses to achieve the higher standard of this current sequence as I do when creating the initial animation and getting it to my typical work-in-progress standard. It’s probably worth spending this extra time because the added detail really seems to bring the characters to life. At some point though, as happened here, I start to hit diminishing returns. There’s an adage that creative work is never truly finished, just abandoned. I feel comfortable calling this version of WWTF2 complete even if it isn’t really finished. The animation can still be improved in several places, and I may do so in the future—by, for instance, inserting a few seconds prior to and at the end of the sequence to help frame the story, adding actual growing body hair (as in WWTF1 or What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger ) and additional props, refining the transitional poses, and cutting between different camera angles. But for now at least, I’m abandoning WWTF2 to continue animating my other works in progress. I will likely do The Mascot next. It anticipate that this will take me a little while, because I plan to work on it at a much more leisurely pace whenever I have free time.

As always, I welcome and greatly appreciate any feedback and criticism about this current sequence. In particular, I’m interested in finding out what people think about the new technique I’ve used on the main character’s clothing.

Animating cloth—especially ripping cloth—can be extremely difficult. The 3D clothing models I use weren’t meant to be ripped, so I was forced to improvise and experiment. I took three identical shirts and placed them on the main character’s model with smoothing and collisions enabled at different settings. Each shirt has a very slight (and slightly different) push offset from the model in order to give the appearance of thickness and create a layered gradual tearing effect as various parts of the cloth get stretched differently as a result of the different settings and morphs applied to each shirt. I then made each shirt slightly transparent so that they appear solid only when all three shirt layers overlap.

I’m not totally convinced by the ripping effect I’ve managed to achieve with this improvised technique. But on balance, I think it probably enhances the realism of the sequence and broadens its potential audience. In any event, it’s close to the best I can do right now with a keyframe-based animation in DAZ Studio. To make the ripping any better, I would basically need to animate all of the transition frames and possibly also modify the underlying shirt textures using localized transparency maps. I don’t know of any way to animate shirt debris other than adding individual ripped pieces of the shirt to the sequence. I’d probably have to create these debris pieces separately if I wanted to have the shirt fall away. If anyone has any better suggestions—either for how to animate shirt rips or falling cloth debris—I’m all ears. Maybe I’m overlooking an obvious technique that would be viable in DAZ Studio.

Finally, let me know if you prefer an animated sequence with this cloth ripping effect to one just having static clothing (possibly pre-ripped)—or no clothing at all—on the main character. To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, compare this sequence with WWTF1 (no clothing) as well as WWRevert (pre-ripped static clothing) or What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger (static clothing). You can also look at the work in progress for WWTF2 (no clothing) to see how this specific animation has evolved and to note some of the details concealed by the shirt and shorts. If enough people feel the clothes-ripping effect detracts from the overall animation, I may do an alternate version down the line.

Enough of my blathering. I had a great time coming up with and animating this sequence. Now it’s time to share and enjoy!

EDIT: Alternate version posted. The rendering time was manageable, so I figured I'd just do it.

Description
Very basic story here. On the way back from a cheesy summer horror flick, a guy involuntarily transforms into a feral lupine-form werewolf in front of his girl. Paralyzed by grief and fear, she looks on helplessly as his humanity slips away under the full moon. His last coherent thought before surrendering to the whims of the beast is that they should maybe have caught the matinee showing instead.
===========================================================

Some comments about the animation:

When doing these animated sequences, I’ve found that it’s easy for me to put in at least twice to three times as much time tweaking the models and poses to achieve the higher standard of this current sequence as I do when creating the initial animation and getting it to my typical work-in-progress standard. It’s probably worth spending this extra time because the added detail really seems to bring the characters to life. At some point though, as happened here, I start to hit diminishing returns. There’s an adage that creative work is never truly finished, just abandoned. I feel comfortable calling this version of WWTF2 complete even if it isn’t really finished. The animation can still be improved in several places, and I may do so in the future—by, for instance, inserting a few seconds prior to and at the end of the sequence to help frame the story, adding actual growing body hair (as in WWTF1 or What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger ) and additional props, refining the transitional poses, and cutting between different camera angles. But for now at least, I’m abandoning WWTF2 to continue animating my other works in progress. I will likely do The Mascot next. It anticipate that this will take me a little while, because I plan to work on it at a much more leisurely pace whenever I have free time.

As always, I welcome and greatly appreciate any feedback and criticism about this current sequence. In particular, I’m interested in finding out what people think about the new technique I’ve used on the main character’s clothing.

Animating cloth—especially ripping cloth—can be extremely difficult. The 3D clothing models I use weren’t meant to be ripped, so I was forced to improvise and experiment. I took three identical shirts and placed them on the main character’s model with smoothing and collisions enabled at different settings. Each shirt has a very slight (and slightly different) push offset from the model in order to give the appearance of thickness and create a layered gradual tearing effect as various parts of the cloth get stretched differently as a result of the different settings and morphs applied to each shirt. I then made each shirt slightly transparent so that they appear solid only when all three shirt layers overlap.

I’m not totally convinced by the ripping effect I’ve managed to achieve with this improvised technique. But on balance, I think it probably enhances the realism of the sequence and broadens its potential audience. In any event, it’s close to the best I can do right now with a keyframe-based animation in DAZ Studio. To make the ripping any better, I would basically need to animate all of the transition frames and possibly also modify the underlying shirt textures using localized transparency maps. I don’t know of any way to animate shirt debris other than adding individual ripped pieces of the shirt to the sequence. I’d probably have to create these debris pieces separately if I wanted to have the shirt fall away. If anyone has any better suggestions—either for how to animate shirt rips or falling cloth debris—I’m all ears. Maybe I’m overlooking an obvious technique that would be viable in DAZ Studio.

Finally, let me know if you prefer an animated sequence with this cloth ripping effect to one just having static clothing (possibly pre-ripped)—or no clothing at all—on the main character. To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, compare this sequence with WWTF1 (no clothing) as well as WWRevert (pre-ripped static clothing) or What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger (static clothing). You can also look at the work in progress for WWTF2 (no clothing) to see how this specific animation has evolved and to note some of the details concealed by the shirt and shorts. If enough people feel the clothes-ripping effect detracts from the overall animation, I may do an alternate version down the line.

Enough of my blathering. I had a great time coming up with and animating this sequence. Now it’s time to share and enjoy!

EDIT: Alternate version posted. The rendering time was manageable, so I figured I'd just do it.