Progress Report - June 5, 2021 (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Sorry for being late in posting this. I was going to post yesterday, but time got away from me and it was past 3AM before I realized it. So I yeeted straight to bed. And I was going to post this earlier today, but I had my evening plans interrupted by a combination of a false fire alarm and then friends wanting to play games way too late.

Today's WIP is still pretty rough, but it's coming along. I've gotten all of the sex-scene animation done - detail motions, lip-syncing, and facial animation. There's a few rough edges (like Femshep's arm clipping through her breasts when she taps Miranda's head in the blowie sequence), but I'm going to fix that in the upcoming mocap clean-up pass.

It's also finally lit, as you can tell! This is a low-quality render, so the final lighting will look a bit smoother, but it's overall pretty indicative of how the scene will look. I might tune lighting here and there, but honestly, I probably won't.

And then finally, I spent today animating the fingers. That was... interesting. Gesticulating is fun to animate, but my god, so many keyframes. So. Many. Keyframes!

Things that I have NOT done yet, and which are very obvious in this WIP, are facial expressions for the non-sex sequences (things like characters blinking, moving eyebrows, and having their eyes not roll into the backs of their heads); polishing the motion-capture; and choreographing the camera (so it's not perfectly still in each shot).

I also need to polish up model clipping. It's not really noticeable in this WIP, but it is very noticeable in some later shots.

I'd say that I'm more-or-less on track from last week. I expect 1 day for narrative expressions, 1 day for clipping, 1 day for camera choreo, and 2 days for mocap clean-up. Last week, I projected 2 days total for lights and fingers, and 3 days for the sex-scene work.  I ended up having a few rough days where very little got done, but the past few days I've countered that by physically unplugging my Ethernet so that I can't get easily distracted by talking to people, browsing the forums, or watching YouTube.

So far, it's actually been surprisingly effective, and I am going to work on turning it into a habit. When I sit down to work, I just yeet my Internet connection and work till dinner-time. Ideally I've been wanting to have a second work period after dinner, but so far every time I've tried this I've been pulled into games with my personal friends, so that hasn't worked out.

I've also tossed the work off to my sound designer. I'll be checking up on him Monday, and then again before next Friday's Patreon post. With any luck, we might have all-but-finished content to share by next week. I'd love to be rendering before the next weekend is out!

And as a final note, again, the music is just a simple anti-piracy measure, to dissuade people from ripping the wonderful voice-work on display in this video. It's not final, though my sound designer did muse aloud about composing his own Mass Effect-inspired music for the clip. We'll see what becomes of that.

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