Chapter 55: Inspiration always comes suddenly and naturally.

“…President. Did you forget that you were going to have a collaboration broadcast with the affiliated streamer?”

When Daon exclaimed as if she had just remembered, Youngjun asked as if he was dumbfounded.

No matter how often Daon usually forgets things, he never thought that he would forget the monumental first collaboration schedule with the 3rd generation.

No, to be exact, he wouldn’t have forgotten.

Even though Youngjun told her the schedule, she would have just brushed it off and moved on like today!

“No way~ I remembered~”

“Haa… Yes, it’s good that you remembered it even now.”

“No, really!”

An awkward laugh was heard over the corporate phone. He noticed that Daon and Youngjun were bickering.

[By the way, is Winter-nim that good at the gorge?]

“Didn’t you know? That’s why she set her goal as Master tier during the New Year’s collaboration. More than that, Winter-ssi is not only good at the gorge of legends, but she’s just good at the game itself.”

[Well… I’ve heard a lot and I’ve seen her play games on the broadcast a few times, so I thought her sense was unique, but…]

“But what?”

[Well, the image is a bit… like that, right?]

“Well, Winter-ssi has the impression of a daughter from a noble family. She looks like she’s never played a game before?”

For now, she was in charge of cool beauty and purity in Seasons.

But Jina carefully started talking, saying ‘not that…’.

[I thought Winter-nim was a Cherry style.]

“Cherry style?”

[She’s terrible at the game, and she coolly swears while shooting the keyboard…]

Daon burst out laughing at Jina’s timid opinion.

“Ahahaha~!! That’s right, that’s right! Winter-ssi’s swearing is not usually great~”

Since Cherry’s image, who is one term senior to Winter, is so strong, she tends to see it with colored glasses.

“But do you know that, Jina-ssi? If Cherry is just a keyboard warrior, Winter is a real gamer.”

Daon often forgets trivial things.

But she never forgets cute things, fun things, and really intense things.

And Winter’s gaming skills are ‘intense things’.

“I once called a former professional gamer I knew and had him play a game with her? He said that if Winter-ssi made up her mind, she would go to Grand Master.”

[Haha…]

‘Come to think of it, if Winter-ssi achieves the goal she set in the New Year’s joint broadcast, Jina-ssi will do something for her~”

For reference, this is a ‘fun thing’.

“Jina-ssi, you’re going to be on TV soon?”

[Honestly, isn’t the problem with Winter-nim more the swearing than Master?]

“…That’s definitely true.”

[I think the next Gorge Kindergarten content will be a crisis…]

“…Hey, Winter-ssi wouldn’t swear at me, would she?”

[She swore at Spring-nim, though.]

“But she’s a colleague and I’m the president…”

Daon’s voice gets smaller as she goes back.

Come to think of it, she felt that Winter might really swear at her.

“…Jina-ssi. You said you’ll upgrade the Soda model, right? Can you tell me how you’re going to do it?”

Now that it’s come to this, there’s no other way to soften the anger than to appeal to cuteness even a little.

Normally, she would scratch Winter and force her to swear, but.

It seemed much more fun to put Jina’s avatar on the broadcast, so she endured the dopamine for now.

[There’s nothing special. I’m just going to increase the number of model polygons a little, create new hair, and apply a Deformation Transfer technique to track facial movements in more detail.]

“Deformation Transfer? What is that? I thought you could just use a face rig to change the avatar’s facial expressions?”

[It’s a kind of pre-processing process for more natural movement. The frame will skip if you just use the face rig. For example, even if you close your eyes, your eyelids tremble.]

“Ah, ha… um… I understand.”

In fact, she didn’t understand at all.

Since it was a difficult word that came out of Jina’s mouth, she thought it must be something great, so she nodded and looked at it.

[More than that, I have to plant the joints on the face again. Right now, I’ve only planted one on each of the eyes and chin.]

If you’re an avatar that a streamer uses, face rigging is not an option but a must.

However, the Soda model was a model that was ‘only made’.

Therefore, face rigging was not applied in detail. At best, only the jaw and eyelids move.

Even so, she has to do things like blinking her eyes, frowning, moving her lips, and puffing out her cheeks so that she won’t be ashamed of a big company streamer like Daon.

“As expected, Jina-ssi! You understand right away~ You’ll make it well this time too, right?”

Daon, who not only Youngjun but also Jina trusts infinitely.

To put it nicely, it’s management by faith, and to put it badly, it’s management by ignoring it.

She may be a big company as a streamer, but she is still a small company as a president.

Still, it’s very fortunate that she has good luck with people.

“Oh! Do you know what our Gorge Kindergarten members’ avatars look like?”

[Well, it’s a problem because I know them too well.]

Daon burst out laughing at Jina’s words.

Well, if you watch internet broadcasts, you can’t not know Gorge Kindergarten.

After finishing the call with Daon, Jina carefully put down her smartphone.

“…Why are they so popular?”

Her head was complicated today.

Like a monitor with multiple pages mixed together.

Jina leaned deeply on the back of her chair with a complicated expression.

She has heard enough through various routes that the Soda model is getting an explosive reaction.

But she herself was still not aware of the heat.

The reason was largely because she considered it a ‘failure’ from her own standards.

“Should I set the standards again?”

With a lingering feeling, Jina brought her hand to the keyboard.

When her thoughts are complicated, it’s best to do manual work that can empty her head.

The work she received from Daon was just that kind of work.

Jina put the Soda model in the work window and zoomed in on the face.

Then, she began to mark the features one by one on specific parts of the face.

Landmark marking work.

This is a work to mark the main points of the face, such as the eyes, nose, and mouth.

When running the face rig program, the marked landmarks are referenced to move the face.

Of course, there are many AIs that automatically capture these landmarks, but it is difficult to apply them to the Soda model.

Soda is, after all, an SD-style character. If you apply AI trained based on real people, the results are not very good.

For clean movement, manual work is the best.

“Anyway, it’s just a matter of matching the positions and marking the points.”

The problem was that about 68 points had to be marked in the correct position without mistakes in order, but it was familiar work for Jina.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”

Jina clicked the mouse with nostalgia.

When she first started making HANA, there was no AI technology that was worth using, and Jina didn’t know anything, so she just started doing manual labor.

It was a time when her body suffered because her head was bad, no different from a head-butting dinosaur.

“Back then, I didn’t like manual labor, so I started studying this and that to automate it somehow…”

Now, she is voluntarily doing simple repetitive work to improve the quality of the model.

Suddenly.

She felt that the current situation was no different from the past.

Maybe.

If she had written the formulas a little better, she wouldn’t have had to endure this hard work.

Maybe she could have given natural movement to SD-style characters…

“The problem was that I was trying to write separate physics calculations for the SD body proportions and retrain the AI model.”

The focus was gradually disappearing from Jina’s eyes looking at the monitor.

It was proof that Jina had completely fallen into her own world.

“From the beginning, the AI model I have, the know-how I’ve accumulated so far, is based on the real-life model…”

Even while muttering to herself, her hands are moving non-stop.

She created unit expressions (blendshapes) by moving her eyelids, puffing out her cheeks, and stroking her lips.

Then, she grouped each unit expression to specify the expression preset.

“Instead, if I apply non-linear transformation to the standard human body data to convert it to SD scale data, and apply the transformation formula to the AI model…”

Her head was spinning.

At the same time as designing movements that allowed for cartoon-like exaggeration.

She came up with a formula to transform a realistic avatar into an SD style.

At the same time as handling the work Daon asked for.

She redesigned the work that Soyul asked for from the bottom, which she had put off for a while.

Jina’s hazy eyes.

Before she knew it, it began to shine with a bright blue light.

“…Jjun. Usually, when you say you’ll send it sometime today or tomorrow, doesn’t that mean you’ll take two workdays?”

“Strictly speaking, it’s counted as 1.5 days.”

“1.5 or 2. Anyway, I’m wondering if I’m too tired because I’ve been broadcasting so hard these days, and I can’t calculate well… 2 times 4 is 8, right? Not 2.”

“Yes. 8 is correct.”

“Then… what the hell am I looking at?”

Daon pointed to the tablet Youngjun handed her and asked as if she was dumbfounded.

The email Jina sent was on the tablet screen.

“I thought it would take at least a week… Did she finish this already?”

A clichéd content and one compressed file attached.

It was none other than the 4 avatars Daon requested from Jina two days ago.

“That’s what I told you, President. Jina-nim is ‘God’.”

It was familiar to Youngjun, who had worked with Jina countless times.

It was only bewildering for Daon, who had commissioned Jina directly for the first time.

“And as it says in the email, it seems like it will be difficult to contact her for the time being.”

“What? Why?”

“According to what I heard when I talked to her for a while… something popped! during the work.”

“??????”