Blue Star Episode 3 - Wip 2 - Trouble! (Patreon)

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Those post-credit scenes at the end of the previous episodes finally start coming to fruition! (You guys totally have been watching through to the post-credit scenes, right? Right?)

As you may recall, Episode 1 ended with Liara heading off to meet with a certain information broken, for information on Shepard. And in the post-credits scene,  the Shadow Broker hinted that Liara's resolve must be tested. In Episode 3, that test is made manifest, in the form of a "greeting party", awaiting her arrival.

But will she pass that test? I think you lads and ladies will probably be able to guess, seeing as I have 2 planned seasons of Blue Star, with a possible 3rd season, all of which follow Liara and Jack as the main characters (not to mention the fact that Blue Star ends by blending seamlessly ["seamlessly"] into Mass Effect 2).

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So classically, I have handled Blue Star (and my other projects) in what I refer to as a burn-bust scheme, where I would spend a short burst of 2-4 days working 10-to-16 hours nonstop on the project at hand (the "burn"), and then spend 2-4 days working on absolutely nothing as I cool down (the "bust"), before repeating the cycle again.

I am handling Episode 3 in a different way: while I may end up doing burns, I am pointedly not making that my modus operandi. Instead, I am going for a much slower burn, where my goal is to have at least one shot done a day, with an optimal goal of 5 or so shots done a day.

Additionally, I am trying to avoid the big-ass render at the very end, by instead rendering out all of the work I had done at the end, and then doing some preliminary post-processing work - mostly just the in-universe sounds, leaving music and ambience till the end. I really don't want a repeat of the club scene from Blue Star Episode 1, which took my laptop 55 hours to render, while my desktop rendered the other scenes.

As of right now, I have a whopping 3 shots done and rendered, introducing two scenes (the previously-posted space scene, and the above-posted hallway scene), for a total of about 15 seconds' worth of establishing footage.

For reference, Scene 1 of Episode 3 (the pre-sex scene) is split into 38 total shots, which can be further categorized into 3 sections:

• Scene-setting & build-up (6 shots)
• Combat action / "Badass Liara" (9 shots)
• Making a deal / talking (23 shots)

Of these three categories, the scene-setting takes the most time because it introduces pretty much all of the scenes that will be used throughout the episode, and so I have to spend a lot of time building them up; the combat scenes will take the second-most time, because they require a lot of unique animation and rapid camera cuts; and the talking takes pretty much no time at all to set up, relying mostly on the camera moving between more-or-less static characters, and most of the time going into the lip-sync.

With this in mind, I am hoping to be ready to set up the talking by the end of the week. If things go really well, I will have the dialogue proofread, sent out to Ivan and Incognita, recorded, sent back to me, and lip-synced by next Monday. But if I can at least get all of the major animations done for scene 1 (including the non-talking animations during the talking scenes) by Monday, then I will consider myself to be totally on track.

After Scene 1 is done, I am going to actually skip over Scene 2 (the sex scene), and work on Scene 3. Just get that squared away, so I can then focus the remaining time (which I am expecting to be 2 to 3 weeks before my tentative release date, which I won't release specifically at this time because of how tentative it is) on getting the sex scene as hot and steamy as I can manage.

So keep your eyes peeled for further Blue Star updates!