Scoring Preview & Animation Update (Patreon)

Hi Patrons,

Hope your New Year has been going well - I'm here to present some updates for Story 8 and what's planned for the rest of the month.

Scoring Work has Begun!

Normally animation scores are done at the very end of production, but since this project is much lengthier, we have a rare chance to hear the music as a work in progress. Powermeep is back as the composer and the above audio snippet is a test excerpt from Story 8. It is very rough, but you can detect the vibe and energy levels, especially as scenes shift.

The Audio preview feature of Patreon is pretty neat - perhaps I'll use it more in future posts!

Animation Progress

Chapter 3 of the animation is 98% done! I'd like to get it wrapped up as soon as possible so that we can get a chunk of Chapter 4 (the big battle) done by the end of the month. We have more hands on deck now that it's the end of the winter holidays, so I expect things to speed up, including my own work pace.

I've been tackling a handful of dragon animation scenes and I'm feeling a lot more confident. It helps that the scenes only depict body parts of the dragon, and not the whole creature. Shots of the entire body and weight often makes authentic animation challenging.

Chapter 4 Setting

This chapter takes up a significant amount of the animation, so the designing the setting was important. Here we see the inside of the Dragon of Mar's cave:

A gold-filled cavern of treasure and ice. Mar's Dragon retreats and hoards his spoils for safe-keeping.

To aid in the depiction of this massive cave, I plan to utilize the power of 3D toon shaders. I combined some tutorials I found online to produce a cartoon look for 3D models that supported textures, and was also affected by colored lights. After hours of tweaking, I'm pretty happy with the result!

The next step is to do shot planning to determine which scenes will need the most 3D, and which ones can be achieved with traditional 2D backgrounds. Shots with dynamic camera angles will be likely candidates for 3D-ification.

I'm curious to how well we'll be able to integrate frame by frame animation with these backgrounds over the course of the battle.

Lots of Animation Ahead

Color palette/concepts by Boks and KAP

The next few weeks will be heavily animation focused as we work through the music-sync'd battle. Wish us luck!