Progress Report - January 8, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Let's just launch right into the post with the highlight of the week:

The Corsair Short Is Officially Greenlit!

I have locked in and confirmed InsideIncognita as voicing Artemis, Milly Stern her partner Medusa, and the magnanimous Ivan E Recshun as the alien Artemis tangos with in the video. I spent some time combing over the video draft with people in my Discord, my good friend Ordagon, and even Innie herself, and we all unanimously came to the decision that the draft doesn't need any real adjustments, and so the version that I shared last week will more or less be the final version that gets produced.

Over the past few days, my focus has been on updating the character models and getting them up to snuff for proper production. There were a myriad of minor issues, such as fixing Artemis' and Medusa's hair being whacky, as well as finalizing some body textures. The biggest change has been rerigging the alien so he didn't become a horrifically distorted mess when his arms and legs were bending, as well as giving him full faceposing and phonemes so he can properly lip-sync.

Let me tell you, rigging up the lips of a character model that doesn't have lips is... a challenge. But overall, I am pleased with how his mouth deforms, and I think it will look convincing in practice, once we put Ivan's affable voice behind it.

Installing the updated alien model was a bit of a task, though. In a nutshell, Source Filmmaker does not like it when you change the underlying structure of a model that's in use. Tweaking what's already there is fine, but if you add or remove any bones or flexes, the SFM will protest. And it protests rather loudly.

And of course, the alien got a complete suite of flexes he didn't originally have, and so you can bet your bunions that it protested. So I spent my weekend writing a tool that was honestly long overdue anyways to help me quickly swap out the old and broken version of the model with the shiny new one, without having to painstakingly relink all of the locks and rebuild the animations.

I ended my work day today with getting the alien model fully replaced. Up next will be quickly updating his baseline face expressions to fit the tone, and then I move on to building out and lighting the scenes. I suspect that will take the majority of the next week. I will also be rebuilding the scissoring animation the video starts on, because honestly I'm just not happy with how it looks right now.

My goal is to have all of the core animation locked down and finalized by this upcoming Friday, and to send a dubbing render out to Innie, Ivan, and Milly before the end of said Friday. With any luck, they'll be able to get at least their non-sex audio recorded and sent back to me by that Monday, wherein I can begin lip-syncing as I finalize everything.

If there are no technical complications on my part, and no schedule complications on the part of the wonderful voice talent, then I think I will have the video ready for a final detail pass by January 19. Which means I am optimistically aiming to be ready to start the final 4k render of the video on January 26.

There is a non-zero chance the video will be ready for release before February 1, but I am by no means committing to that. I've learned all too well over the years that despite my best efforts and my best intentions to account for things and provide plenty of buffer for when things go wrong, there is always something that ends up taking more time than I could ever hope to prepare for.

But that's where things are, and that's where they're going. Next week's update should have some juicy lit scenes from the video, as a sizeable step up from the unlit brick-walls-and-concrete-floors of the draft I've shared thus far.

Slut Squad Has Tentatively Begun Production

I say "tentatively" because it feels a bit disingenuous to say that it's really started production. This past Saturday's stream saw us spend far more time than I wanted to prepping Tina's character model ahead of the game (took me over 3 fucking hours, and that was after I spent 3 hours before the stream prepping everything - about half of that time went into me writing a tool to facilitate a single minor change, and then another third of that time went into me constantly fucking up and doing the same process like six fucking times...).

We ended that stream with getting Tina and her outfit into Unreal - and even then, we didn't even fully finish that, as her outfit's materials are unfinished and unsorted and it looks like a bomb went off inside the assets folder as a consequence of it. But, as you can see by this post's top image, we've got Tina into Unreal, fat bimbo tits and all.

And I gotta say, she's looking pretty good.

Next Saturday's stream will see us clean up the outfit and get its materials properly working, hopefully fix up the badge's materials (I am just not very happy with how it looks right now), and building the base UI for the game. I would also like to start putting together some of the data structures the game will require, but I want to get something tangible to show first.

Once we have a basic functioning UI and some data structures in place, and actually get some basic feedback between the UI, data structures, and the game state, though, I think I will be more comfortable in saying that Slut Squad is properly in production.

Slut Squad is just an on-stream project, meaning it will only be worked on one day a week. So progress is going to be slow. But if you're interested in seeing it unfold, then I invite you consider watching our livestreams on Saturday. You can find them over at Picarto.tv/LordAardvarkSFM/ , and the stream is every Saturday at 3PM Seattle time. You can look up what that time translates to you using the World Clock.

So that's where things are now, and where they're headed.

So far, 2024 is looking like a pretty good year for us. Let's see how long that lasts.

Until next time, everyone!