Progress Report - September 9, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

So upfront, let me start the post by saying that the schedule slipped. The target September 13 release is a no-go. I'm now eyeballing September 20.

Last week, I stated that my goal for this week was to get all of the detail animation done this week. That didn't happen. Let me explain (not excuse) why.

Those of who that have been around for a while know that I sometimes have periods where I fall into a depressive slump and have a hard time finding the energy to do the simplest of tasks, and focusing on things is all but impossible. And those same people also know that the slumps usually only last about a week, and I always bounce out of them.

I slid into such a slump on Wednesday, and it didn't clear up until this morning. Which means that I only effectively had last Tuesday and today where I could really focus on work. I managed to eek a little bit of work throughout the week, but it took monumental effort to focus on anything for even an hour.

If anyone of you reading have executive dysfunctions like ADHD, then you know what I'm talking about, and you know that when your executive function has decided that you can't focus, there is no fighting it - you just can't focus.

Before I continue with the gory details of things, I want to mention that I put together a smash-cut of what I DID manage to get done this week. It's still rough, but I think you can already see just how much of an improvement it is.

Click here to view the smash-cut!

Now, for the rest of this post to make sense, I need to briefly explain that "the detail animation" I had hoped to get done this week actually consists of five parts:

1.) Non-sex gesticulation, which is the catch-all term I use for body movements during talking. So head motion, body motion, and hand/feet motion, all of which is paced to match the vocal performance.

2.) Non-sex expression, which is the movement of cheeks, eyes, and eyebrows during talking, similarly matched to the vocal performance.

3.) & 4.) Sex gesticulation and expression; the same things as before, but during the sex animations. These are separate categories because they are built in fundamentally different ways. During non-sex sequences, the head and body do not have existing animation, so I build the animations from nothing. During sex sequences, the head and body do have existing animation, so I have to build the animations on top of the existing animations. It's an entirely different process, and so I separate it out to different parts for my sanity.

5.) Jitter animation, which is the glue that holds all of the pieces together, most evidently the "listening" and "watching" segments of animation. This is the natural body sway and shuffling evident when someone isn't actively doing anything.

As a general rule of thumb, each of these take roughly a day to complete. The exact time depends on how much work needs to be done, itself depending on the animation length, shot composition, and how intense the performance to match is. But roughly speaking, one part a day.

The reason why I didn't break this down last week is that it shouldn't have mattered. I should have been able to get all of it done, or damn near most all of it done, within that week.

But, as I mentioned at the top of the post, that pesky brain chemistry got in the way of things. As such, all I managed to get done are the first two parts: on Tuesday I managed to get the non-sex gesticulation done, and today I managed to get the non-sex expression done.

Thankfully though, as I said earlier, the slump seems to be over and my executive function seems to be at its usual level of dysfunction, rather than the crippling dysfunction it was sitting at most of this past week. And so I should be able to get the rest done by the end of this week.

And then as a closing note, I do want to state that I honestly don't think we would've been able to make the September 13th deadline anyways. I haven't heard from my sound designer in the past few days, and we were hoping to get together today to go over his first drafts. Something tells me his schedule has slipped, too. So even if I was ready to render, he likely wasn't ready on his end anyways.

That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!