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Progress Report - October 15, 2024
🕑 Added 2024-10-15 21:53:03 +0000 UTCHello, everyone!
So fun fact, I didn't realize I used the same exact shot for a point of comparison this week as I did last week. Total coincidence that it just has the best representation of the changes made, within the first project file.
With that being said!
Every day, we step closer to the finish line. All of the jitter animation is done across the 15-minute project, as well as all of the camera choreography / animation. I'm now working on fixing hair clipping. I've gotten the first project file cleaned up, with two more project files to work on throughout the week.
The latter project files should be a fair bit easier to deal with, because there's only one long-haired character (Symmetra) in them, as opposed to the three characters in the first project file (Emily, DVa, and Symmetra). Pharah's hair is fairly well-behaved, with the only major issue being her bangs clipping through her cap - something I was able to largely fix by simply editing and recompiling her hair. Similarly, DVa's hair in the remaining project files is tied back, so it really shouldn't cause any problems. Ana's hair, when it comes up, shouldn't cause any issues either.
That all just leaves Symmetra's hair, which will definitely be the major hurdle for this pass. Unfortunately, while Source has a robust jigglebone engine for generating dynamic motion, it doesn't have any collisions. Meaning that while the hair can bounce around convincingly while characters talk (look at Pharah's braids in the WIP), it doesn't respect gravity or clipping - see how Symmetra's and DVa's hair are both basically just straight lines in the top GIF. And so any bending to conform to gravity or to shoulders I have to do by hand, which isn't too big a deal for most of the motions. It's really only when characters have major head motions, like Symmetra looking up at Pharah to talk, that things get complicated.
But that's where we are. We've gotten to the point that the focus is now on extremely minor details, which means the journey is almost over. As I've said before, we're now working on the things that people don't notice when it's done right, but definitely notice when it's missing.
After all of the hair clipping has been tamed, the next thing to do is go over all of the shots and make sure the lighting looks good, adjust the sweat values as necessary, and make sure I didn't miss anything obvious.
Then I do a low-quality full render and see how it all comes together in the edit.
And if everything is looking good there, I pull the trigger and do the final 4k render.
Like I said, we're getting close now. It is possible I'll be ready for the final 4k render by this time next week. It's not a promise, just a possibility.
Until next week, everyone!
Comments
Lord Aardvark
Howdy! Thank you for the kind words! And indeed, that is the plan. More specifically, I plan to take a few weeks away from the work schedule to focus on three things, before returning to spend a month (maybe a month and a half, we'll see) working on Overbreed Episode 1. Then I shift gears to another short video. The three things I plan to focus on in between projects are: 1.) Finish processing the Frozen video for dubbing, and send it out for audio recording. Not actually installing the audio, just marking it all up for the voice talent to be able to record for it. Remember, the fucker is nearly an hour long. 2.) Make some hard progress on my non-LordAardvark Unreal game project. The skills I learn and systems I develop for it can be adapted for lewd Unreal games made in the future. My plan of casually working on it in the evenings has been waylaid for the past few weeks, as this project has gone way over schedule and I've been focusing on just getting it done. 3.) Exploring animating in Blender, for use of various different simulations that I simply don't have access to in SFM. Cloth simulations for skirts and jackets, soft-body simulations for titfucks and thigh-jobs, fluid simulations for facials, physics simulations for hair with actual collisions and a respect for gravity. Most of these things are fairly straightforward in a vacuum, what I really want to explore is building up the toolchain for integrating them all quickly and seamlessly into a full scene file. And then when I get back to working on Overbreed, my big goal is to finish the core motions for Sequence C. It's about two-thirds done now, and I really just want to finish it. We'll see how long it takes to get there, but that is my big goal. The minor goal for Overbreed is to continue exploring the animation-layer system that I grazed the surface of while polishing this project. I think I can expand it even further for even more control, and possibly be able to make jittering non-destructive, which would be HUGE for giving me flexibility in how I currently build animations. And if I can figure out how to automate transferring animations, then I can have an entirely automated system that will allow me to swap out the older version of Mercy the animation was built with, with the new one that has blush flexes. Once this here animation is finally out the door, I will be formalizing this plan in a full post, rather than hiding it here in a response to a comment. But since you asked, I figured I might as well share the plan early, since it is directly relevant.
Carlo Panella
quite new here, love the content, this animation looks so fun and hot, was wondering if youre gonna continue overbreed part 1 after this cause that animations is like: holy cow? obv you do you :)
Josh El Loco
The masterpiece is closer to completion!
empheezie
nice
