Story 6 Progress Update (no spoilers) (Patreon)

The following post contains no spoilers. The scene in the above gif has been edited to be context-free.

A lot has happened in the past few weeks, so I thought I'd give you guys an update on the animation.

 We are about 57% complete with the overall animation, and 70% done with storyboards (pre-visual for plot events). Production momentum has picked up due to the recruitment of 2 animators (yes, animators, not cleanup artists). Barthimo1 and Sugarratio (hi!) are helping with some pivotal scenes, and I'm sure they will not disappoint. 

There is a bit of a learning curve on my end for fulfilling a director role, but I'm finding it very invigorating to implement a new collaborative process.  I'll still be setting up the key poses, layout and doing a majority of the animation. But I am really appreciating the extra hands on deck.

Feb 1st Deadline

I'm not sure if we'll be able to make it. A lot of resources are being poured into the main battle and climax, while the ending sequence + credits are largely unfinished. Production speed will have to keep speeding up if we want to finish by February 1st, because my spreadsheet currently estimates April 6th.

A possible scenario is that the animation is submitted to the AG online film festival with a temporary, rush-job ending sequence/credits. Then later, perhaps mid-February/March, the official release of Story 6 will come out fully polished.

Bitrate and Compression Demons

For quality control, I'll occasionally do a full render of a piece of the animation to test how the final product will look. For Story 6, that involves adding compositing and rainfall special effects to a scene.

When I play the render on my computer (locally), it looks great! But last week I found out that when I uploaded it to Twitter, the video quality tanked. 

See for yourself!  
https://twitter.com/GildedguyArt/status/1207394246032076801 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpB23ZvySxo

The textures and colors are muddy and pixelated. Even more concerning, this same issue occurred with YouTube (1080p) and Vimeo.

It's all because of video compression - the added rain FX causes a lot of unpredictable movement, making it hard for encoders to play back. I don't know how to fix this yet , but I'm confident others have bumped into this problem, and solutions exist.

Other News

Gildedguy is now a Twitch Partner! The push was a success thanks to all the stream viewers, new and old. The channel perks are nice, but I'm more excited to accomplish a goal I've had my eyes on for years. The animation streams are still going, so again, if you don't mind spoilers, please come by.

Also, the secret santa still needs takers. Free art gifts/commissions await you! Just head over to https://discord.gg/N9cBbrV and read the pinned posts.

Thanks for checking in on this update. The animation is really coming together (I wish I could share more, but you'll have to wait). In the meantime, have a happy holiday season.