Progress Report - December 5, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

It's been a milestone day! Last week, I noted my aspirations to get the Claire/Jill video's lip-sync fully finished either Friday or Sunday, and get it ready for a sound-design render.

Well, I indeed managed to get all of the lip-sync done on Friday! Sunday was spent going through and doing some minor technical fixes, such as Claire's boots for some reason being completely broken, or Jill's undershirt going full Cliffs of Dover over her breasts.

And then today, ohhh today, has been spent actually putting out of all the renders. The project is split across 4 files, and each file has 2 audio tracks (except one, which has a third audio track), resulting in a total of 9 audio files that have to be exported out.

Due to a quirk with how SFM's audio-only export works (audio is about 90% of the reason why SFM is still in beta, it's very roughly implemented), I need to export video alongside the audio. This isn't a huge deal, because the video doesn't matter in these cases - I only want the audio - and so I can set the video quality to absolute minimum and get it rendering out as fast as I can get it.

But even then, rendering out 22.5 minutes of raw footage twice (plus some change for the single file that has a third audio track) is a long endeavor. I've been rendering for over 12 hours now, and I am only now - as I type this sentence - exporting out the very last audio channel, with 6 minutes to go on the render.

Then there's the video render going on my rendering machine, with full lighting and low quality. Because the lighting is important, for things like thunder and the fireplace, so my sound designer needs light cues to work with. Those are taking several times longer. Sequence 2 of 4 will be done rendering in about an hour, and I am going to set up Sequence 3 rendering overnight as I go to bed.

Sequence 4 will be rendered when I get up. Once it's done, I will be putting together a master file with all of the audio in place, and sending it all off to my sound designer to begin his work. This is a huge project, so I expect it's going to probably take him a month or two to work on. And that's assuming an ideal schedule. He did just finished just university finals today, so here's hoping his schedule will be free for at least a few weeks, to get a good chunk of the work done.

But that works just fine, because I still need to polish the animation. Especially the narrative animation, which is just stiffly blocked out, without any character emoting or motion as they speak. I'll probably get that done before the audio is ready, but, it is what it is.

As an aside, you may have noticed that I didn't put the Refuge poster for today's Progress Report. That's because I used that two weeks ago, and I wanted to shake things up.

You may have also noticed that what I did post for today's Progress Report is a continuation of the Batcat storyboard I shared a few weeks ago. I ended up having some free time Sunday evening, and decided to work on it some more. It's a direct continuation of the previous storyboard, so check that out if you haven't already.

Where this storyboard ends now is where I wanted to get the storyboard to when I posted it last. Alas, I only got about two-thirds the way there. But, we're here now.

Hopefully I'll be finding some time to slowly chip away at over the coming weeks.

And then finally, I have been making some decent progress on the Super Hidden Secret Project I teased many weeks ago. Not quite ready to reveal it, though. But the second protagonist has been put together, after 3dsmax gave me a lot of lip and crashed on me 3 times, forcing me to completely redo her faceposing four times, and having to wait for the current sequence's render to finish before each restart (launching 3dsmax fucks up renders, and since these are audio renders, I can't arbitrarily start-and-stop them, they have to be done entirely in one flawless sitting).

I did finally reveal that project to Incognita though, whom I'm sure you all recognize for the various characters she's voiced for me in the past, including a certain sassy blonde whom I can't work with anymore for fear of legal repercussions. She is extremely excited for the new character, and is very eager to slide back into the same sassy role that this character is built to seamlessly replace.

I have started feeling out a debut video project for the Super Hidden Secret Project. Nothing concrete yet. Nothing's even written down yet. But there is a vague direction and some ideas. The big difficulty is that the Super Hidden Secret Project is only one of three stories, part of a much larger Omega Clandestine Classified Project, with a lot of backstory to cover. It's hard to find a good slice that's representative but not overwhelming, while still be concise. But I think I'm getting there, and I know we'll get there in the end.

Well, that's all for this week's Progress Report!

Until next week, everyone!