I've discontinued the Marie animation. Depending on who you are, that's either good news or bad news.
I think it bears justifying my decision going forward, but if you aren't concerned with the reasoning, you can skip the consequent paragraphs. TLDR; A new animation is in the works, but it's still in fairly early stages. Nothing to show just yet.
During the most recent Tifa animation, I came to understand that a lot of my work for the better part of a year has lacked any real passion or soul. Marie pt2 illustrates that fact perfectly well; a stagnant, sterile sequence of loops. Pair this with a male character model that necessitates being disembodied by the frame and you're left with weak compositions and limited potential interactions.
I apologise for those of you who were looking forward to it, but I can't gather the enthusiasm to work on something with the knowledge that it is so fundamentally lacking.
One of the prior limitations has been the inclusion of dialogue, given how cumbersome even a couple of seconds of face animation is. In trying to resolve this, I spent a day tinkering with some facial mocap. The results are far from perfect, but they provide a significant framework to build upon, meaning that future works can actually include onscreen dialogue without increasing my chances of suffering an aneurysm.
This leads quite nicely into the newest projects in the pipeline; based on the overwhelming support for the last release, I can't imagine anyone needing more than one guess as to who will be featuring centre-stage. As mentioned, there's very little finalized work ready for public viewing. Given that the last batch of wips found their way onto rule34, I'm opposed to releasing anything that isn't close enough to being complete.
Anyway, that's surely enough of me droning on for this month. Cheers for the support for the latest release, maybe next month I'll have something to show ya. That'd be nice.