Episode 9 Progress - 06/15/19 (Patreon)

Oh man.  Oh man I have had a hell of a week.  A real roller-coaster with a lot of frustration.  Here's where my checklist is at:

Okay, so, in order to start work on the cameras at the beginning of this week, I had to do something I'd been dreading for a while.  I've actually been working in Blender at an incorrect scale, where everything being animated was ten times larger than it needed to be.  I realized this way too far into the animation process, and said to myself that I'd just have to correct this once all the character animation was finished, as scaling everything down mid-animation would break my workflow.  So, at the start of this week, I scaled down everything to the correct proportions, and, in short, it just broke everything.  All my parent constraints, some of my rigs, and a bunch of other stuff just broke or disappeared.  I had to manually go back and place objects back in hands, re-scale a lot of stuff, and, a lot of times manually re-animate objects frame-by-frame.  And, in short, I fixed it.  It took me half the week, maybe more, but I fixed everything, and everything is now at the correct scale and looking fine.  Now that everything is at the correct scale, things like lighting and particle effects are way easier, as they are working properly for once.

This week, I also finished all the texture work and did a lot of experimenting with particles.  All the bubbles are complete, and the Pokeball effects are almost there.  I am now very, very comfortable with Blender's node and particle systems and I feel like I now have the knowledge to confidently complete all the effects I need.  It's really weird to think that I went into this never having done something in Blender before outside of small tests, and now I can confidently output virtually anything I can think of making.

Oh, also, the camera I bought for this project is fantastic.  I'm currently on frame 6,600 with the camera, and I'm finally able to accomplish all the little camera moves and proper focusing to generate the look I've been wanting to give this.  It's going swimmingly despite it being a pretty tedious process.

I don't want to promise anything, but in the back of my mind I'm planning to finish this by the end of the month.  Despite the huge hiccup at the beginning of the week, everything after that has been going really smoothly.  I can now see an end coming to this project in grasp.   Hopefully by next week, all the camera and dust stuff will be done and I can move on to lighting.

Thank you all!