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Progress Report 01.03.22 - When the dust settles…
🕑 Added 2022-03-01 12:37:46 +0000 UTC So, The Ritual got finally released, reviews are in and I’m glad overall people enjoyed it. I think a little summary post is in order. In the first place I’d like to thank everyone who participated, including all of you who supported me financially. There are some special mentions: Helldemon, our wonderful Discord admin, who meticulously went frame by frame, piece by piece of the animation with me to help find issues. Pyreaus, who is responsible for the dialogues and coordinating things with voice actresses. Speaking of VA’s, they also did an outstanding job, and to tie it all together EvilAudio pulled through with some juicy sounds. WHERE DID IT COME FROM? Now, where to start, where to start… it all begun with a small looped animation of Meru getting banged by a wolf. People liked it, so I expanded it into what later became known as “part 1”. Well, people seemingly loved the setup, so we got a continuation which became known as “part 2”. And demanded more. Now, at first the “part 3” was just supposed to be another ~6 minute thing with the big boy, but it somehow got out of control. It was too big of a project to just ignore it in the story, so we got some lore included. And then I kept adding and adding to it and we somehow ended up with fully voiced 35 minute animation. I’m glad I was able to finish it, but it was an extremely challenging project, and for many reasons it was mentally exhausting, so I don’t think I will be doing an animation of this length anytime soon. I’ll aim more for ~8 minutes length. WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG? It took way too long. There’s a few reasons for that, but it boils down to bad planning mostly. I had part 1, part 2, which were sort of okay, but not really, and I just started animating part 3 with just a rough plan and just kept adding stuff as we went. So the animation came first, then came the script, then the animation was adjusted for the script, then came the voice acting, then animation got further adjusted for the voice acting. As you can easily tell, it is not the optimal workflow. It allowed some extra creativity (the random funny stuff, like Miru getting dropped down on her head), but it’s just a stupid way to work. The other thing was the 60 FPS. The animation was made and keyframed in 24 FPS. Interpolating it to 60 FPS is not as painless as you’d think, a lot of weird artifacts pop up, a lot of adjustments have to be made on scene per scene basis. And there’s over 40 blender files to go through and fix. Not to mention going from 24 to 60 is a 2.5x multiplier on not only render time, but also simulation bakes. And I personally don’t think 60 FPS even looks better. With all this in mind, moving forward, I’ll default to 30 FPS instead. I’m sure there are some 60 FPS enjoyers that are disappointed by this, but it’s just not worth it, sorry. Next thing that took a lot of time was fixing clipping. As I mentioned before, Helldemon was a big help on spotting the issues, but fixing clipping, especially hair, is a nightmare that took many, many, many hours of manual adjustments. And it’s still not perfect. I’m looking into solutions for this, but the physics systems available in Blender are kinda lackluster. SO WHAT’S NEXT? I did all the backups and clean-ups and switched to Blender 3.0+. There are some new cool tools I need to check out. I’ll finish the very very late “request competition” entries soon. At the same time, I want to do a quality pass on the character models, I’m unfortunately not a great character artist, but I hope to be able to do some improvements, especially on hair and genitals. Also the older models will need to be fully re-rigged, because the armatures are starting to show their age. Of course we are planning thea next animation, this time with a better workflow. I don’t want to spoil it yet, but it will be placed on the timeline just after the events of The Ritual. I’d like to thank you all for the support and look forward for things to come! TL;DR Future animations will be aimed at ~8min runtime and 30 FPS. Meanwhile, fixing stuff.
Comments
I'd just like to see more intermingling with your other characters your animations were top notch even from your first couple so I'd say your doing well so far
Nastassya
Im not talking humanoid ones^^
No disturbing things guys, just eggs, larvae, monsters.
BigGreen
Probably not, that'd be disturbing to watch I think.
Nastassya
I would really love if you could animate babys for the girls to give birth, that would be fucking amazing <3
I expect at least some consequences. (one or two puppies.)
Good things come to thos that work hard
dont worry mate, im also working on 3d stuff and what iexperienced so far beside basic crap renders,if that is hard,,the animations is a super pain in the ass. and dw again we all loved it.. it was fluid and worth.watching and cumming :D
Red
Congrats on finishing the animation! I can’t wait to see it once I have some spare time :)
