lordaardvarksfm
patreon
Progress Report - July 4, 2022
🕑 Added 2022-07-05 08:32:16 +0000 UTCPreviously, on LordAardvark's Patreon...
That's all for now. Next progress report, I should be neck-deep in model-work. So many outfits to build... So many outfits...
And now, the conclusion.
==
Hello, everyone!
This past week has actually been pretty uneventful, which in my line of work, is actually a good thing. If you've been around my Patreon any extended period of time, then you likely know that "eventful" means "had complications that not only set me back but frustrated me to the point I wanted to throw my keyboard out the window." So, uneventful is good indeed.
Last week, I had 8 of the 10 animated sequences built, and was expecting to get outfit work done after finishing them off.
For once in my life, I actually made an accurate prediction as to how much progress I'd get done this week. Don't worry, this will never happen again. After building those last two animations, I have managed to put together six new outfits for the Overwatch ladies. Very technically, these are being effectively used for eight outfits: Brigitte with her overalls on is being considered her work outfit; Brigitte with just pants and tanktop is considered her casual outfit; Mercy with her labcoat on is considered her scientist outfit; and Mercy with her labcoat off is a surprisingly comfy looking setup calling for hot cocoa, a good book, and a cat curled up in the windowsill.
Beyond just the new outfits though, I've also managed to get the pregnant morphs built onto all 10 of the ladies who end up getting knocked up throughout the course of Overbreed (you didn't think the title was just all flash no substance, did you?) and their outfits. And I also managed to put together a loose / untied hair for Widowmaker. Which, holy shit is her hair long. The hair mesh I used as a base was pretty long, but I had to nearly double its length for Widow. And then rigging it was... a thing.
I am absolutely not looking forward to animating with that hair in Episode 5.
Beyond all of this model work, I also got the last of the dialogue recorded for Episode 0. Bordeaux Black and Mimi Hung will be having brief single-line roles as Zarya and Mei respectively, and hopefully they will be able to consistently voice those characters throughout the miniseries - they both play very crucial roles in the story. If you recall the episode poster in the pinned Patreon post, you'll observe that Zarya has a role in every single episode, in the Sequence A column.
The particularly astute of you may recognize that Episode 6, which is the finale of the miniseries, breaks from the traditional format of the previous episodes and focuses entirely on Zarya, with a junction between Mei and Zarya in Sequence B. Without spoiling anything, let's just say that nothing Episode 6's structure is by chance. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to interpret that how they see fit.
Looking to the immediate future, in terms of outfits, I only have 3 more outfits to make: Two wedding dresses for Pharah and Symmetra, and a quick transfer of Mercy's labcoat over to Moira. It fear it won't be quite as quick as I'd like, on account of the fact that the rigging is going to have to change to fit Moira's proportions, but the labcoat is rigged up like a dress. But at least the fitting itself is done. Small victories.
I also have some minor clipping issues to fix with Zarya, that might require me to do some more extensive work on her outfit than I'd care to admit. And then, I need to put together a neat epipen-esque injection system for the Overbreed serum itself. Yes, believe it or not, the literal namesake of this entire 6-episode miniseries hasn't actually been modeled yet. Lock me away, I'm a criminal.
Once all of that is done, though, all I have left to do is a handful of bespoke textures, and some graphic art. Overall none of that should be a challenge, just arduous. Texture work isn't fast, even when it is fast.
After that? I get back into Source Filmmaker and polish off the animated sequences. This includes scenebuilding and lighting most of the animated sequences. It possibly includes parallax animating the "still" scenes - I need to do some research and experimentation and see what works best. And, most time-consumingly, it means animating the few non-still sequences.
The bookend diegetic sequences with Zarya and Mei will be trivially to animate, they're just a total of 3 lines of dialogue. The real time-sink is going to be the diegetic shots of Mercy giving her televised monologue. A lot of lip-sync. I am definitely going to be bringing out the automatic lip-sync pipeline for that.
And, since Mercy is just standing behind a podium for most of it, I'll probably break out the motion-capture for it, too. Though, this time I am going to not track shoulder motion, and will instead just animate the shoulders by hand. In retrospect, I should have taken the hint when doing the motion-capture for Fraternization: maybe tracking shoulder motion is hidden behind three advanced-option menus for a good reason. It definitely came out hella janky, and even after I spent literal hours trying to correct it by hand, I think it still brought the motion capture as a whole down.
But, live and learn. And this time, I learned to try a different way.
Finally, a more general note: The past few weeks have gone suspiciously well, and I think my attempts to reset my sleep schedule have been a big contributor to that. I don't know why or how, but I am cursed with simultaneously being a night owl and an early bird - I am predisposed to staying up late into the night, but if I get up early in the morning then my productivity simply goes through the roof. Obviously these two contradict each other, but I've been trying to reign in the late nights and foster more early mornings. And overall, I think the past 2 weeks have born the fruit of that effort.
So yeah, that's where we are, that's where we're headed. Hopefully this time next week, I will have all of the model- and texture-work done, and will either be in the efforts of making the graphic art, or will be working on scenebuilding out those animated sequences.
Until next week, everyone!
Comments
empheezie
nice
