Patreon Update (Patreon)

This month, I've completed all of Andre's facial morph targets, as well as his wing fingers. The latter could use another pass with the weights, but for all intents and purposes, Andre is fully rigged! He plugs in well with the existing animations, so it will not take too much effort switch the rigs over in the existing animations (with the exception of the shots with straps in them, which I will touch on in a bit). This took me a bit over 2 weeks to complete.

I've been animating in the last week, and tonight I completed the first new dragon growth animation shot in 9 months! It's 7.5 seconds long, but I want to complete at least one more shot (potentially two) before I release this months rewards; so that means I'll need a week or so extra again. At this stage, I anticipate rewards to be sent out on May the 13th.

In addition to me wanting to spend another week animating, I'll be going away on a holiday in June for a bit over a week. Because I anticipate things will ramp up at work around that time due to me taking this time off, I am doubtful that I'll be able to create enough content for a rewards cycle. So I'm deciding now that I'am going to suspend my patreon in June. However, while I won't be accepting pledges, I'm still going to work when I can, so I'm going to re-arrange the rewards dates a bit so that those three weeks in June can get bundled up into other rewards cycles. The anticipated dates of when I will be releasing each round will be as follows:

reward cycle:          sent out:

APRIL: MAY 13

MAY: JUNE 17

JUNE: *suspended*

JULY: AUGUST 5

AUGUST: SEPTEMBER 5

etc.

The April, May and July cycles will each get an extra week worth of content development. So while the may cycle in particular will be heavily delayed, it should be bigger on content so hopefully that makes up for it. If you have any comments or concerns about this, please by all means let me know!

As for the state of the projects:

My Little Kaiju:

While Neo has done some work on the MLK environment this month, I have not added any new animation; but I will need to spend some time on it next month. I still estimate that I have about three months worth of character animation work left on it (which I will be working on in tandem with dragon growth), so I'm aiming to have it ready to start rendering by the end of August. It should get released later this year.

Dragon growth animation:

There is probably about a minute worth of character animation left; this in itself could be finished off in a few months, but there are a few more things that need to be done as well, not the least of which going over the existing shots with the two new character rigs. There will not be all that much work in each shot, but there are 60 of them, so that adds up.

At the moment I'm planning on spending a large chunk of my patreon donations on getting this one out the door; I am still hoping that it can be released by the end of this year. So that I can focus more on animating what is left, I've been talking to commissioning a number of people for tasks, and this includes:  

- The strap dynamics need re-evaluating, and minor remodelling. I have sent an example scene to someone; hopefully they can get it working and agree to do the rest of them.

- The scenes need to be dressed with the new environment assets; I have been talking to someone about this, as well as looking at lighting and possibly materials.

- Thirteeenth is finishing off Andre's maps; and after that will be working on the wolfs texture. When completed the character work will be done and ready to render.

- I have been talking to an animator to help out with some shots. This is potentially exciting; while I imagine I will need to go over their work in order to get it fully polished into what I want, it does mean that I should be able to boost the monthly progress if this works out.

- I have lined up the same sound foliage artist to work on the sound once it is finished.

- I have had preliminary talks with the musician who is making the score for MLK to look at doing one for Dragon Growth; but we won't be talking more about this untill after the MLK score is completed. 

Rub For More Wishes:

This project has been super slow to get going, but there is potentially an excellent opportunity opening up later this year; I will likely get some free access to a professional mocap setup. I will know more in a few months; but should things pan out as they should, I'll be able to capture most of this project over a weekend or two. The mocap will need some cleanup and re-purposing to make it look more stylized and less mocappy, but this should be a hell of a lot faster than me keyframing everything. I'll report more on this when I know it. 

In terms of assets, Andre will be getting a red texture variant along with his grey material, the rat will need a texture, and I will need to set up the environment I purchased. However, once I get started on this, progress might move very fast ^^. This should be completed some time in 2019.

Thanks everyone for your support; and I hope you're enjoying the journey. These projects will be truly next level, and You're making all this possible <3