catastrophe
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Hi! Big report
🕑 Added 2024-07-12 09:59:40 +0000 UTChi. Probably many of you have already started to worry and once again I apologize for the prolonged silence. we responded as quickly as possible to everyone who asked questions (as always), but the situation dragged on a bit with the public report.
a few months ago, my tablet broke and I was waiting for the arrival of a new one, but in the meantime, customs was spoiling my nerves and stalling for time - I tried not to waste this time and started optimizing all processes. Namely, 3D character models, which we use to make it a little easier to pose (instead of sketches) and choose the most interesting angles and maintain the right proportions of the characters even in the most difficult angles. This allows you to significantly save time, but outdated 3D models did not help the process so well, because they were made relatively quickly and carelessly, and creating a couple dozen careful and highly detailed models requires much more time.
Nevertheless, I hoped that this would not last for more than 1.5-2 months and was going to show the results and achievements of our team soon after the previous report. But - there were several other events that delayed this project.
The main one of these events is optimization, which I mentioned. I will attach what we have achieved to this text.
Secondly, we hoped to launch the 2.0 version of our private server back in January or February, but this was also delayed - in the country where most of our programmers live, there is a war and many unpleasant events such as a blackout for a significant part of the day. And a couple of months ago, there was a risk of total mobilization and we frantically rushed to finish what we had been doing for 5 years. And we have finished it - the last tests are left and we will transfer the databases to a new server (no, nothing will change for you - it will just look more beautiful the site where you receive content updates). New features will be added, bugs will be fixed and over several hundred functions will be improved overall. Including the translation system, which is easier to show than to tell about it. In short, this will allow you to quickly and easily translate the project into many languages, and also adjust the shape and position of the text "balloons". After all, different languages have different word lengths.
In general, we had a huge traffic jam due to an unpleasant combination of circumstances and we solved all this without a break all these months that have flown by.
This optimization will allow us to move faster, improve the character design (it will not change dramatically, still I would like to make the whole comic one style), but we will adjust some little things to improve the quality of the comic.
And yet - given the care with which we created new 3d models, we took a couple of "extra steps" and added details such as clothes, fur, etc. to show you how it could look in the 3d project format. We have been thinking for many years that this whole journey would take 2-3 times less time if it were a 3d video, and not a series of manually created images. It's just that now we spend 90% of our time on manual labor, which a computer would do much faster and better than any human. And especially against the background of the emergence of neural networks, which are difficult to compete with in all areas - the idea of trying to create a full-fledged film has become quite obsessive. I understand that most of you would hardly like such changes and, of course, we will not impose them on you and radically change the style and appearance of the project without the approval of the majority of subscribers. The vast majority. But we thought - why not show how it could be? And ask what do you think about this possibility? At the end of the project, we hope to redo a significant part of its early pages so that all pages become better and differ less in style and quality. But this is a huge amount of work and time.. maybe it makes sense to try to make something like a 3D scene, a demo? or at least just to show how it might look on a static frame? Just in case most of you, at the word "3d video", immediately imagine something disgusting, pathetic quality, with ugly models. And only for this reason will they vote against this option. We thought if at least 95% of subscribers would like the idea... Maybe we really could.Try to turn this into a full-fledged video. Purely theoretically. I may be wrong about the timing again, but it seems to me that making all the episodes you have already seen in video format would take about 10 times less time than we spent on this project as a whole. That is, the time is comparable to that which will have to be spent on the final pages. Only stationary pages can turn into a moving video ;)
However, I would like to emphasize once again that if at least 15% vote against, everything will remain unchanged.
now about the timing of the updates - now we need about another week to complete the last minor work on the server. and a week to complete the remaining few models. I made a strategic mistake by starting this optimization work in front of the shots with a huge crowd (many many characters). If these were shots where we have 1-2-3 characters, it would all be completed faster. But the following pages should have contained almost all the characters of this project almost immediately. And this is the third reason why it took so long. But this month we will definitely resume updates, it will probably happen towards the end of the month.
The optimization done will allow us to move much faster and this means that we will finally be able to eliminate these damned delays, the backlog accumulated over the years of the project. Including these months, which have created a new pause. It's just a little more time to complete it all. And a new server and new models for the project. Over the past year, we've gotten damn tired of having to work a lot more than 8 hours a day and often sacrifice weekends to keep up the pace of work. Updating the processes will finally restore the balance in life between work and leisure. And don't lose the pace too much. It is still difficult to estimate exactly how much faster and easier it will be to work, perhaps twice - then we will leave the speed unchanged. If updating the process turns out to be a little less effective, the number of pages per month will probably be slightly reduced (remember, funding has fallen by almost 40%). But we will try to ensure that this decrease is not 40 or even 30%, of course. But we will be able to set the final speed only after a month or two of updates. After such a long pause, there are fears that the creation of pages will take a little longer until practical work restores all skills. in any case, you will get a better product. And of course - pages in all months, in each month in which the payment was made. The main purpose of this optimization was to solve this main problem. our accumulated delays.
Well, in a few months we will try to translate this project into several of the most common languages among our subscribers. as soon as we finish the final touches on this work.
thank you all for your patience (to those who showed it). We have been working all these months with almost no rest and no days off to complete this lump of urgent work. Just so that no one thinks that we just decided to take a vacation.
And the best part is, take a look at what we've got. I suppose you won't need to sign where the old version is and where the new one is ;)
and yes , it is not so difficult to make a 3d model and does not take much time. But to create a much more complex skeleton than usually happens, to create muscles, physics, subtle deformations of the body - that's what took so much time. More precisely, half of all this time.
Very soon we will finish and a very powerful fountain of updates will begin. All our artists have been impatient to return to the sequel for quite some time, because we stopped at a very tense moment. For which I apologize separately - we probably would not have started this optimization for many many months, but the breakdown of the tablet served as a "magic kick" and we finally did what we hoped to do, but postponed for many years.
Comments
CATastrophe
Yes, as soon as we make some big updates, we'll set aside a day or two to try to make a short demo animation with facial expressions and simple character movements. According to bulge physics, we were unable to fully solve the problem of the interaction of body physics and clothing physics in a Blender, since clothes are simulated and processed in another application. Blender's own funds in working with clothes are very far from an acceptable level so far. But we solved this problem with manual animation, which created a similar effect =)
Xri
I am a simple man, I see a bulge physics, I am happy. Nice render tho, the 3D render idea instead of static pics sounds interesting, we shall see how it looks like with some kind of demo presentation.
CATastrophe
Actually, it's Joy, he's an ermine ;) perhaps we should still adjust his head towards slightly less anthropomorphic features and add a little more ermine features. Milo, we'll show you a little later. Wait It took most of the fuss to invent a skeleton (rig) in which everything would work better than in conventional riks. we tried 3 of the most famous systems and five custom rigs, but all of them had a huge disadvantage - the shoulders of the character. They don't work well in all known rig systems. And even the muscle system could not cope with this problem if you attach it to standard rig systems. The shoulders in all of them worked so terribly that we had to create this part using our own technology and it took almost a month of fuss to study these technologies and create the best option. But now that we have this solution, we will simply apply it to the rest of the sculptures and finally get the perfect rig with excellent anatomy and body plasticity. Then there's just a little routine left.
Muddypaws
So if the attached images and animation is of our favorite feline, I can hardly wait to see the results for our favorite bunny girl and the various studs on the farm
