November Update (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads! It's time for the run down.  I wanted to wait a few days to check on the progress of a couple projects and it's had a big impact to the future.  October was crazy!  Between all the conferences and illness it was really intense and difficult to accomplish much, but we still made major strides on the POV system, which is a huge deal going forward.

RWBY Trainer

Since it's the main project let's get right into it.  I mentioned it before, but the main animator we had on the RBWY trainer ended up not working out.  Deadlines were missed and the final animations delivered weren't ported over correctly, making them largely unusable in their current state.  On a positive note, we reconnected with Adamar to do more custom animations for us, but his plate is pretty full so we might not catch him until the middle or end of the month.

In the meantime, I've been working on stepping up my animation skills to offset the wait for the big hitter animators.  That way I can still get new content out to you guys and hopefully you don't think it sucks lol.  While I'm new to direct, from scratch, hands on animation, I do have a fairly indepth understanding of animation and lots of references to pull from. It's also mostly a matter of time, which is in short supply these days. So it's not so much whether it'll look good or not, but how many passes it takes to get it looking really good.  I'll try to get in at least 2 or 3 passes before sending it out, but if it needs tweaking, feel free to comment and let me know.  The more specific the better.

The first of which will be Pyrrha's Scene.  All the girls will initially be in their cells / on display in the menu scene.  Since we have Pyrrha now, we can add her in as well.  The restrained device from the preview image for this post was too crazy not to use once I found it.

The next RWBY Trainer release is planned for this weekend or the next.  The goal is this weekend, so barring anything crazy happening, keep an eye out.

Premium POV

We've made great progress on the trainer and I appreciate you hanging in there during the bumps along the way.  We've been through dozens of versions of the experience and have finally gotten a camera system that works.  Along the way we've been told to do it the easier way, leave the body out, stick with controller recentering and on and on.  Even though it was a struggle the payoff for you guys will be huge.  While there is still some testing needed, the initial tests on my side and with the beta testers was a success.  This means a truly hands free experience across all major headsets, that just works.

That not only means that we can complete date nights and create more combo releases across different series, but we can turn all that extra attention back to the RWBY Trainer and work on porting things for mobile VR devices.

In Closing

November stands to be a great month!  It's really exciting to see how things are coming together.  I want to thank you all for your support, your patience, your feedback and your suggestions.  We're really taking VRA to another level!