[Update] Scene-Building Done, Moving on to Micros and Audio Prep.

This one is more of a mini-update as this animation enters into its final stretch.

After much wrangling with Blender's cloth simulation system, all of Rog's clothing is now sim'd and ready for action. I jumped right into doing scene-building after that and finished all of that off too. Now there's just one major thing left to do before it's time for rendering (along with some smaller stuff related to audio).

It's time for micros:

So it's time to finally replace those placeholder micros with the real deal.

I’m going to be trying something a little bit different this time round. I have a decent selection of modern-day human models (casual-wear, business-wear, etc.) and a much smaller selection of fantasy human stuff. None of that really fits with what I have in mind for this scenario, so I've taken some time to make some of my own:

I'm keeping it fairly simple. I don't want to fall into the pitfalls of scope creep this late into things, and they're not going to be all that close to the camera anyways.

This trio is going to enter into the scene just in time for the ending stomp, while I'll be using silhouettes for the rest of the micros scattered in the background. That or something much lower poly. I'm still tweaking the scale of the micros in this scene at the moment; I want to keep them as small as possible, while still keeping them visible throughout the action.

Anyways, I'll be spending this last stretch going through and setting up all these micros and their animations. Hopefully by the time I'm done, the audio I've comm'd for this animation should be ready to go and we can get this all rendered.

Getting ready for audio:

Now, Rog doesn't have any spoken lines in this animation, but he's still gonna be making some noise. Grunting, growling, yawning, etc. I’m already working with someone to get some done for this animation, and we've gotten through the first draft of audio at the moment.

Now it’s just a case of doing more takes till it's ready to go, and then making any needed adjustments to the head and facial animations to match. Once that's done I can animate in his beard and hair too (eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed their absence). Though honestly, I've been thinking about redoing the design of Rog's beard...

Anyways, once both versions are rendered after all that, I'll be going in and adding the remaining environmental and ambient sounds to finish things off.