Update #60 - Mechanicus Animation Making of (Patreon)

Morning Gamers.
Finally a bit of a more substantial post since I'm not crunching as hard this round. Congratulations to Nameless Guardsman and Christian Sibbitt for winning Mechanicus keys!
Speaking of which, since the semi-secret is finally out I can talk about the animation Extellus did for the video. We had started on it in early December. 

When I worked with him this time around, I decided to forego the terrible MS Paint storyboarding I did last time which will hopefully never see the light of day. Instead I was able to just script it out completely in writing, with only a few reference pieces of artwork. Luckily Extellus is already familiar with Warhammer 40K so there wasn't really a surprise for him when it came to content which saved me from my fears of having to poorly explain lore. One of the most striking things about Mechanicus was the music, so I decided to forego having sound effects entirely (though David's mixing went over really well last time) and instead just time the scenes to the soundtrack. Extellus was incredibly quick to pick up what I was going for, and it's one of the many reasons it's so great to work with him. Even if I'm more vague on a background or anything else visually, he can understand the mood I'm going for with ease and make something out of it. 
A while later it got storyboarded out.



He certainly surprised me.
The original plan for what became shot 6 was originally going to be shots 6-9. There would be a shot of a techpriest whacking at a computer, another maybe lighting up some incense, etc. I think my exact words were something like "techpriests doing their thing up to your own interpretation". I've found when working with people on projects in this area they have a lot to bring to the table creatively and should definitely have some room to improvise. What I didn't expect was a wildly ambitious turnaround shot. Completely his idea, as a personal challenge. Madman. Everything was a bit more refined out, and we moved forward.

The plan was (and still is) to have some minor continuity between any animated segments, both so that anyone new has something to like about them but also to have some fun things for long time viewers to pick out. However, to match up with the mood of 40K Extellus was worried that the style we went with for UnReal World might've been too cheerful still. So he brought his brother onboard (also an excellent artist) to do backgrounds on it. Comparing to the original, there's a lot more hatching and the background is darker, but it's also clear some time has passed with moved tools and less firewood. So it's not just the exact same everything but GRIMDARK.

Everything was progressing nicely. He had some delays due to coronavirus related troubles in his home country, which normally wouldn't be an issue since we're fine to slowcook these things without a time constraint. However, this time there was a timetable since we believed things would be wrapped up earlier, so now a sale for the game had been scheduled to be simultaneous with the video.
Uh oh.

The gif is reduced down in size and frame rate from the original for the sake of file size.
The only 3D elements in the video itself were the throne and the Ark ship itself. There was a model made for the character on the throne, but he traced over it in order for it to appear with the same consistency as the other line art did and so the color fill and everything else wouldn't stick out as being a model, since now it was 2D work. We skipped back and forthing on perfecting any rough stuff as Extellus dived right into clean lines due to lost time. As expected, everything was outstanding anyways. However, he had a idea to replace the original shot 5.

While a wide shot could definitely work, we were on a time frame now. It would mainly be a still background except for the snow, and animating the flowing clothes of three different characters overlapping would've been insanely time consuming to say the least, along with doorway light and other things I'm sure no one thought of. The angle he came up with was also more dramatic, though the original plan for it was also going  to be a still shot except for the snow. I thought that might be too still, so I thought of something easy and quick.
Eyes?

Well...it's not quite as dramatic and mysterious compared to having no eyes. Though everything was clearly more static without them.

Maybe he had a preference?


Ah shit.
After brainstorming, Extellus had another great idea. So we made a deal.
If he got his previous work finished up in time, he'd add some animation to the cloak and ditch the eyes. If he didn't, we'd keep them. We agreed that we needed something else going on even if it was minor, but with an actual time crunch this time we couldn't just slowboat it like we did last time. Even with him having help on it there was no telling if it was going to make it or if we'd have to make some sort of re-edited cut down version with the real one just being on here and his own channel at some point. After all, this was now the day before the video should be out to line up with the sale and I was hoping the developers would have a real good weekend.
I was up all night finishing some editing and recording things up for the beginning section of the video since I had minor bronchitis and couldn't voice anything the week before. Still needed to redo far too many takes. He was finishing the animation while his brother got the final background tweaks completed.
Ultimately the video with the animation was rendered for the first time roughly an hour or so before it was public. It was seriously down to the wire.
But hey, the cloak made it in!

So things definitely got spooky near the end. As I said last time, there'll definitely be some more of these since we're both already eager to do something else with it, but they do take time and I don't want to overdo it. Hopefully, we both won't be experiencing irl stuff that makes things get too hairy again. It's not a good feeling.
Speaking of which, the next video is going to be Total War Warhammer 2. I'm done recording for the base game 1 factions with only one of the DLC ones left, and I'll be completely focused on playing a bunch of the game to finish up the footage I need. I still have some of 2's done as well, but it's a bit more sporadic compared to 1, and I'm trying to organize my files carefully into a lot of sections to not get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content while I do this. This is without a doubt the largest video I've worked on by sheer size, as expected, and I do have some surprises planned for it so I'm juggling that as well. It might be this month, it could be next and I'll combine credits in that case, but I have no idea what this monster will become. I'll still post updates here to keep everyone in the loop so you know I'm not dead.
As always, thank you for your support! More budget for videos means getting to hire artists to do cool bits like this every once in a while.