Text update 9 March 2022

Hey everyone, Marie here. Sorry I’ve been sporadic with compiling the text updates the last few months. Miro and I have had more scheduling conflicts recently so it’s been harder to get his insight to flesh out these posts into meaningful updates. At the same time, we’re seeing the Blender team deliver content at a more consistent rate, which means we can do more showing and less telling. Given that, we’re going to reserve these text-only updates for the weeks where we have no visual content to post. We’ll still update you on what’s happening behind the scenes, but we’re going to pack that info into content posts when content is available.

Here’s James’ write up of what’s going on with the production teams at present.

In terms of animations, as mentioned in the Blender animation preview we posted last week, we’ve got quite a lot lined up. We’re finishing up audio and video edits for the AA31 and AA33 anims featuring Clarice and Cerene. Also just received the blend file back from the artist working on AA30, so it’s now just a matter of cleaning that up and getting lighting/atmosphere sorted out.

In the meantime we're taking a closer look at Lanessa’s Bloodlust outfit this week with the rigger that’s been helping transfer our characters across. Once that’s done, we’ll look into transferring Sophia across (we’ve already played around with her model but now we need to get everything set up cleanly texture wise and test out her rig).

We’re also in the process of trying to arrange direct access to the render farm we use for Maya so we can submit and retrieve files ourselves. Recently we’ve used a middle man which means if something finishes rendering over the weekend we can’t review or queue up a new render until Monday. We’ve really enjoyed being able to quickly render things in Blender – the instant feedback you get from being able to render locally in a few seconds really speeds up production – so adding some efficiency to our Maya process in this one way will help things move along faster.