Update - Shizu in library, with the... candlestick? (Patreon)

tl;dr - I've been animating one big Shizu scene! (And doing a few other things, but who cares about those?)

This week's image

This is, as you can probably see, a rather grainy and low-res image by my usual standards. That's because this is actually just one frame of a massive animation I've been working on! I've shown part of this on the patrons-only channel on the Discord server already, (don't forget to connect your Patreon account to your Discord account so you can get the private channels! Although I'd love to see you on there either way) but basically I'm doing this from multiple camera angles and I think it's turning out pretty great. I can't wait to show it off some more.

Rendering animations

While there has been some other stuff going on, like me publishing for the first time on Newgrounds, I'll probably talk about that stuff elsewhere. Or I already have, in the case of putting together the trailer! Instead, for this update, I thought I'd talk about the main issue for me this week, which has been rendering animations.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: they take a long time. I've been leaving my computer on through the night, rendering non-stop to get these frames done. The Shizu animation I've been making is totalling up to about 100 hours of rendering time (that's not the time spent posing it or anything; that's the time my computer spends processing it, basically). That's partially because it's such a cool animation that I want to show it from multiple angles and give it enough time so I can get about a minute worth of voice acting to play over the top of it.

I can't take much personal credit for how great Shizu's movements are in this animation, I'm afraid; they're from a very high quality, store-bought animation. Still, it took me a lot of work to successfully adapt them to the appropriate figures and account for some errors; then get the lighting and camera angles right, not to mention the fact that I had to manually pose Shuji myself.

This actually isn't even the only animation I've done; I've got an Emi thing in the works too, but it's very different and I don't quite know if it's going to work out the way I want it to, yet. We'll have to wait and see with that one; I don't know if it'll be too hard to get it to work, but I think it's at least kind of cool.

$3 patrons are about to get an animation

I've scheduled a higher quality version of an animation from the game to drop as a reward for the $3 tier in a few minutes, so look out for that if you're interested. ;) I've also scheduled a poll to drop after that, asking about whether that's a good reward to have. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I'm keeping things short this week because I've been talking a lot lately. Are you looking forward to seeing this scene animated? Or am I wasting my time focusing so much on it? Let me know in the comments!