WIP Update - 5/27 (Patreon)

Hey all! 

I apologize for the dearth of WIPs for this month, but I've been hard at work getting the transition stages + camera motions set up! Getting COVID hardcore messed up my original timeline, but gave me more time to think about how to better optimize the scene and work on different variations of the growth. At this point the animation is roughly 3500 frames which brings it up to nearly 2 and half minutes, but I've still got a bunch to re-time and re-loop (specifically the final growth/burst stage), so it'll most likely end up being 3.5-4 at the end. I'm swapping up a couple positions so that the animation is more dynamic, and working on adjusting the shapekey stack so that I don't need to make a new key for every stage of the growth. I was able to consolidate a bit of the rat's nest of an NLA editor, but at this point I'm going to have to re-pose a few of the later positions to clear the slate and organize the child-of constraints. At any rate, it's been a lot of technical organization, but it should let me make more minor/custom loop adjustments for dialogue/expressions, and I want to be sure the scene is all ready for sound+VA. 

I'd planned to have this entire animation done this month, but I guess if the last few weeks have been any indication I'm pretty awful at estimating time. This was part of the reason that I had wanted to do the 24 hour challenge to force myself to focus on the big-picture animation bits rather than dawdle on the details, but I've definitely let you guys down as of late. My motivation has been a lot better as of late (especially with the warm weather), but I need to hold myself accountable and buckle down to get this finished. I'll be taking a few days off this weekend to spend time with the fam, but next week I've blocked out time each day to dedicate to the animation. Hopefully I'll have more to show come next week, and I'm keeping a list of projects to get a jumpstart on once the pre-viz is sent to the VA.