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🕑 Added 2023-09-10 10:43:19 +0000 UTCRose demo, 430 mb
(14 day estimated time)
soon we will have some more demos where the character interacts with clothes, plants and other things. These are the last tests to look for potential problems and to estimate how much and what stage of work will take. And also - how much will such a video weigh. We will be very grateful for your comments. Don't be shy about criticizing - fixing something at the beginning of the journey is much easier than later. We have some time for quick fixes if we've done something wrong. Also evaluate the size and quality of each video. We put there several versions of the same video, the difference is only in size and compression ratio.
we ask you not to distribute this demo in the near future. Soon we will publish an improved version and some more demos. We are planning to use them for an advertising campaign at the restart. If one of the new people comes here interested in the video, we will have to explain to him that the video is not included in the current tariffs and this will create unnecessary fuss. The reason is mainly this.
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We've finally got a huge update for you all!
Preparations are complete and we can finally announce that, by the end of next month, we will try to release the sequel in video format. Considering that we don't have the video module in our engine ready yet and we don't have enough experience and practice - there may still be delays, but they will be quite small, within a week. Last month was hellish, the beginning of this month was also agonizing. We are already working on new content. Right now. In the meantime, you're about to see our first video release!
It's not main content yet, it's just a demo - practicing our animators and testing facial expressions, mecha physics, body shapes (we've updated the design a bit) and everything else. We've been going at it for a hell of a long time and spent all the nerves and energy. I hope it was worth it.
And now a small history of all events, a detailed report on the situation. The most impatient can watch the demo and only then flip through the text ;)
Link to the demo is at the very bottom.
details! This has been a huge undertaking for us! As a bit of a background, around last winter we linked up with a professional 3D engineer who had a ton of skills and showed us how to switch to Unreal Engine from our old programs. Sadly... this person was not able to deliver all he was promising and, after taking our money and delivering a truly awful demo, we realized we'd made a mistake in hoping to hire the person...
an old acquaintance with whom we once worked in a large company. This is where our friendship ended. BUT, they did open up the door for potential improvements to our rendering quality and speeds... and opened the door for potential video content! This person was obviously a professional, but clearly didn't put in the time or effort we hoped for... BUT... after a few weeks of learning the tools, we were consistently producing similar quality work. We were working hard after this first major mistake, deciding to go all the way with revamping our working process to integrate the much more promising UE software.
There were a series of horrible situations and mistakes and impossible problems with no solutions in sight: like transferring fur data from Blender to UE... Importing things through Maya... 3dMax... Houdini... Learning and trying and starting to find what worked best through all this software took months of constant work! Mastering fur generation turned out to be one of the holy grails of 3D rendering, and something that would take potentially years to master!
With two thousand dollars invested into Blender plugins... THEN spending another thousand for new plugins to transfer our Blender data to UE... A lot of this learning process was costing over our monthly budgets... and that's before our programmer's time, working on this all month. And, after all this? The fur from Blender were awful in UE!
With studying morning till night we finally started to solve these issues. Thousands of pages of text, weeks of video manuals, dozens of forums and discord communities, specialists from famous studios producing million dollar budget movies. We spent and invested to learn learn learn from every source we could get our hands on, private lessons from the best. And we were finally able to show off a relatively decent demo, which we shared around April-May time!
It's taken us a lot of mental and physical strength, and fighting against the wall of potentially impossible odds! It's been a lot of hurdles that many told us were potentially impossible. 90% of the way there... 4+ months of constant study, and we hit a major disappointment... Animation!
UE still was working badly to actually animate our final products. One tiny mistake causing HOURS of manual work to fix. With every small change to a character's design or model (which, in our fetishes... was going to be nearly constant!) could take days to fix, add any lighting changes to this and rendering a minute of video was taking 5 hours rather than the intended 20 minutes. We had options... but it meant bald-looking, ugly low-render fur, once again back to that holy grail problem!
It turned out that UE was great for creating games and locations, and has huge advantages for that. But... was pretty overrated for movie making. So, after months? We returned to Blender, and some positive surprises! While we'd been learning the limitations of UE, Blender had been solving the same problems we left it due to. They'd updated tools and released more plugins: render times and video memory issues had been reduced – and through more experiments, we found that the fur qualities were more superior to what we could do in UE! And we found a better rendering plugin, allowing us to use our PCs as a render farm. And many many others.
We've now been able to reduce our rendering of one frame from 2 hours to fucking 4-5 minutes! – and all of our experience and practice has also allowed us to implement cooler physics and better rigging and anatomy!
And now we could start moving forward: hiring some novice animators part time and getting help from a more experienced animator, we've been starting to invest in improving our animators and their skills! :)
So? 8 months of work, without more than a single day off each month... And where are we up to? Well, now we have the skills to make up for the delays a lot better! Being able to render images in 5 minutes rather than 3 hours between tests? Yeah... we've got the skills now!
We've been creating and learning so many new things!
We've been so grateful for people's overwhelming support and patience while we've been through this gauntlet of learning opportunities. It's been the most exhausting time of our life, and we've not been able to post as many updates as we'd like because we've had to focus on overcoming all these issues: for the past three months we've been living a day-to-day of “just one more week and we'll be able to show this off!”
It's an awful feeling when you find something small that takes weeks to learn to fix...
We've fixed the models a hundred times, and that's not even an exaggeration at this point. Skeleton, anatomy, textures, topology, materials, we've had to tweak and change everything. We'd take a breath and realize a month was already almost over and we COULD post an update, but a video was so close to being perfect to show off... So we'd wait, find a new hurdle to the perfection we were chasing... So we waited. And then we'd look back and realize that another month had flown by. It was awful, we were waking up, sitting at the computer all day, and passing out again – it really messes with your perception of time!
We've been so grateful for all of your amazing and overwhelming patience, especially with so little to tell or show besides these long rambles about character meshes and how close we are to solving unsolvable issues.
Of course: as we've said many times before: Every month you've paid for will be returned with all the pages owed! Now we've overcome the technical issues we can create much BETTER pages much easier.
Over the previous few years of this project's life, our forced backlog (departure of a team member, low funding, and technical problems of poor technology) all resulted in significant delay and backlog. It was a little delay every month.
They accumulated over many years in a whole year + behind schedule. And after that we started to change the technology, which took another 8 months. Therefore, we decided to divide all our heroic subscribers into several groups, each of which will receive a bonus in proportion to their patience and faith in our team. We've been through hellish times together. And we want to thank you with additional bonuses, in addition to content.
+ a group of those who have not canceled payments seeing a huge pause of almost 2 years, we have 25% of such people. You get a lifetime discount on all projects of our studio that will use the technologies we have received in the future. Fireproof bonus. You will be able to receive videos at the price of pages, at the old price. Without changes. In all our current and future projects. This price will never increase for you in the future. If you wish, you can change the access level in the future also without losing the bonus (but taking into account the peculiarities of changing the access level, nevertheless). In case our financing exceeds the cost of the project - we will offer you additional discounts and someday - probably a completely free subscription.
+ the second group - those who did not leave us, seeing a delay of a year (up to 7-12 months). You also receive a bonus like the top group, but it only applies to the current project and only if you do not leave it for more than 3 months. currently in this group another 20% of our subscribers.
+ And finally the third group, who showed patience in the range of 1-6 months. To everyone who saw the pause and canceled their payments? We totally understand, trust is very hard to come by and rewards are what make a project like this worth it. You have our total understanding. We want to reward your patience proportionally, as a thank you, taking into account everyone's individual circumstances. You'll receive video content at the old prices for the same number of months you were able to support us during our technical hiatus: if that's 1 or 5 months, you'll get that number of months worth of video content even at the photos-only rate, but then you'll need to switch.
Sadly part of this rationale is because storing videos on our server is a lot more costly, and while we're talking hundreds of times more server space for distribution, what we can promise is that it'd be nowhere near that sort of increase in price to see the videos!
So. What are the new prices going to be for videos?
Tentatively, the prices we are thinking for video content are:
$13 for 1000p videos
$15 for 1920p videos
$16 for 4k videos.
how long will the video be per month?
We can't promise an exact duration yet, as different videos will have different numbers of characters, different amounts of human labor, and different render times. Even if there would be only one character in the entire video, this is also a very different amount of work. If we look at the character from the front, we see his face - this is hours of work with emotions, highlights on the eyes and nose. Language work.
If we look at the character from the waist up, this does not require animation of the toes and saves a lot of time.
If we are looking at the character from behind - no face animation is required, but there will be a tail - it is easier to animate than a face, but it also takes time. If we look at the character from the side, we will have to animate both the face and the tail. In general, there are some nuances here that we still have to fully understand only in the process of work. In any case, we plan to devote much more time to this than the available funding. At least for a long time.
If we don't manage to bring in new people and increase funding in the coming months to make the project pay off...
in which case plan B is a return to static images. And this time there will be much more of them than before (after all, we will be able to make them many times faster). But we still hope that we can work with animation - it's very exciting and inspires the whole team.
but still on the duration: we will aim for 3-5 minutes of video per month, if possible. These are the figures we are thinking will be fair, BUT... we can't stress enough that they're an estimate for now, and the effort and time to produce videos is even harder for us to predict at this stage than the static work we've got more experience with.
We don't know we problems we might face in time, or any other potential delays in our process. We're rounding on the low side for the amount of hours/days we predict it could take to create a few minutes of video. Right now our team is tired as hell and we have to pace ourselves for what funding will allow us to create at the moment.
The amount of animators and hours they work will definitely depend on the project growth. The more funding, the more can afford to invest in this. With our new grasp on the technology, and our new plugins we've invested in, we are able to create things faster and better than before, but there are no clear numbers on our pace going forward just yet. And obviously, there are factors that might reduce the length of videos, two characters in a video isn't twice as complicated... it's more like 3-4 times as complicated!
The amount of labor and duration of rendering depends on a lot of factors, and very large scenes involve synchronizing parts of renders in a video editor after the fact. We're still taking into account all the nuances and time costs for publishing and distribution too, of course. After a few months we can assess our production speeds and have settled into the new routine well enough to have a more accurate idea of our new “norm” and how to value our time and funding. While we do this: we'll also be studying motion capture technology (we've already started working on this, with a real actor whose movements can be replicated by our models).
Our current budget-level solutions are far from perfect, and still require a lot of work. We just haven't had time to perfect this side of the process yet. We honestly just need to rest from our intense training time, energy is low on trying to master the next thing (some of us have dozens of new games, books and movies in the last year we've had no time to finish with this hellish training marathon!).
We plan to dial back on our training, at least giving us a week break here and there! We've spent the last 8 months of our lives focusing exclusively on all of this... But, yes, our long-term plans are investing in motion capture (probably six thousand dollars for the most optimal solutions...), which could make things 5+ times faster in the animating stage!
And, for those who just want the story, and don't need the videos, and wish to continue in the picture format: we're hoping to maybe make static versions of the videos - pictures, if we move fast enough with video production!
For those of you who don't care about any of these new formats? Probably nothing will change for you. You'll still get the static photo story! We hope to create many more static frames with this new technology as we work through the video production format.
Again. And again. We want to thank everyone for their patience and for cheering us on through this. It's a high level of trust we value and never want to let you all down with. We lost about 10% of our funding the last few months and that is... amazing. It's incredibly generous and we are so damn proud to have earned the support of a fan base with that kind of commitment. We know it's a rare thing in this industry. We promise gigatons of content to come, a host of other projects... and as many rewards as we can give you all for being OUR personal saviors...
The technology we've arrived at will radically improve our studio's projects. And we hope to reward our hero sponsors from this project with content from our other (or future) projects where we can. We have to calculate that, of course... but we're serious that you've made all of this possible and we want to give you back rewards for ever penny you've given us.
While we've been preparing this from the tech side. Our scriptwriter has been planning out at least half a dozen stories, and one of them is incredible! We can't divulge anything yet, just in case the wrong people hear! But we promise it's an idea you all here will REALLY enjoy!
We've attached our first video demo, one of a series of demos we plan to be showing off in the coming weeks, now that we're ready!
This demo shows our new mesh, body customization and stretch, facial expressions and other improvements we've learned (like better physics!). There's still improvements for us to make, and we plan to make those improvements “on the run” so to speak, as we create content.
We'd love to have your feedback! Any of your first impressions and opinions. Your feedback is very important to us, critical or not: if something needs improvement for you, let us know and we'll improve it as (and when) we can!
Regarding our practicing new animators who we've been training with for the past few months, we'll also be linking any projects that they choose to create. We plan to link to their early projects they're creating entirely in the video format. These early releases will be of minimum complexity, with our practicing animators working on improving their fundamentals. For now, more complex scenes in our core projects will be handled by our more experienced contract animator (you probably won't notice too much of a difference, our newer animators work very hard, and we teach them very well ;)
Oh! Yes! Also, in parallel to all this technical development. Our programmers are also finishing version 2.0 of the distribution server! There will be an alpha test among our artist team soon, then a beta test among green mark sponsors (VIP and long-term trusted sponsors).
We hope to migrate all our sponsors to the new version of the server in October or November, if everything goes well. The new version of the server will be more intuitive, better looking and generally more convenient – but won't be too different from how the current one functions!
The new server will better support video and PDF formats (and other formats useful to our artists). Until the server is ready, videos will be distributed via private message links on the old server. The new server will be much faster, with the update feed generated in advance, not as you browse, preventing any pauses when logging in.
For the video distribution, we're not entirely sure HOW it's going to work yet, either a player with a download option, or just files to be distributed, there's still viability tests to be done. We'll explain more in our next update!
In the meantime – we'll have new demos till the end of the month, and several more planned! As things are going, next month we'll be able to catch our breath, then continue with content creation for you! If we don't hit any major stumbling blocks, a new major video, with the main story, will be released by the end of September or early October!
Thank you all again, for everything. We hope you're excited for the future of this project as we are!
Rose demo, 430 mb
https://dropmefiles.com/rl8AU
(14 day estimated time)
soon we will have some more demos where the character interacts with clothes, plants and other things. These are the last tests to look for potential problems and to estimate how much and what stage of work will take. And also - how much will such a video weigh. We will be very grateful for your comments. Don't be shy about criticizing - fixing something at the beginning of the journey is much easier than later. We have some time for quick fixes if we've done something wrong. Also evaluate the size and quality of each video. We put there several versions of the same video, the difference is only in size and compression ratio.
we ask you not to distribute this demo in the near future. Soon we will publish an improved version and some more demos. We are planning to use them for an advertising campaign at the restart. If one of the new people comes here interested in the video, we will have to explain to him that the video is not included in the current tariffs and this will create unnecessary fuss. The reason is mainly this.
