Progress Report - July 30, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

The Pharmmetra video is currently out for dubbing. It's a big project, clocking in around 15 minutes total, with 6 characters to be voiced. It's a logistical nightmare, and I am expecting it to take a few weeks for all of the pieces to come into play.

While I wait, I am working on putting together all of the remaining details that don't strictly depend on the audio being in place. I recently finished up the base lighting for the sequence, where I tweeted about a detail of the time-of-day changing throughout the video. Since then I've started working on a bit of the highlighting, adding bespoke per-shot lighting to just make things pop a bit more. You can see a brief example of the before-and-after with this week's post image.

Here's a more extended preview of what I am looking at for the highlights, with one shot from each major sequence.

Over the rest of the week I intend to clean up the models a bit more. Symmetra's pants still clip in some more extreme poses for example, and you can see the collar of Pharah's sweatshirt has some dodgy rigging under her jaw.

I also need to put together the render target for DVa's phone, which will present some interesting artistic hurdles because the poses weren't explicitly made with the phone screen in mind, so the few shots where you can see DVa's phone screen may require some artistic license to look somewhat decent.

Lastly, I need to assemble a tool that will allow me to more easily propagate and attenuate the ladies' sweatiness throughout the video. I intend to get the girls all properly sticky by the end of their nine-hour sex marathon, and I know from experience doing this with the Gaige and Corsair videos previously that it's just a fucking chore to manage it all by hand. I love spreadsheets, don't get me wrong. But spreadsheets to manage the sweat values on a shot-by-shot basis is a bit ridiculous.

On the subject of sweat, I am thinking I may end up looking into building new specular maps for the Overwatch ladies as well, with more defined and pronounced sweat drops. When I built the Toon texture set that they use, the original idea was to abstract the sweat to a general sheen. In practice though, I don't really like how it looks. So I need to look into ways to build more explicit sweat-bead speculars.

But I'll be honest, I expect most of this week and all of next week to be a whole lot of me just sitting on my hands. Due to the logistical complexities of this project, I elected to have all of the audio be recorded at once this time around, instead of my usual approach of having non-dub audio recorded while I make the animations, and then lip-syncing the non-dub audio while waiting for the dub audio to come in.

That decision slows the whole process down, but when dealing with 6 characters and juggling the schedules of the wonderful voice talents involved therein, I ultimately decided it'd be easier on everyone to just have one big block of time taken for this project for each of them, rather than splitting it up across multiple weeks.

It means the project takes a bit longer overall, but it ends up being easier on everyone involved (except possibly me). And I think that's more than a fair exchange.

At any rate, that's all for now. Until next week, everyone!