Progress Report + Poll Results

Alright! Back quicker than usual this time, since the polls wrapped up. Which means first off, poll results!

Mixed Media Short

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A Bet Maid (Part 2): 38%

Silas Station Consequences (Part 3): 38%

Danger Room: Not Just for Training: 25%

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So...um...huh. A tie. A part of me wants to just go ahead and do Silas Station Consequences (Part 3), since I have that more planned out. On the other hand...A Bet Maid hasn't gotten much of a fair chance yet. Soooo, with that thought, I'm planning to do A Bet Maid. I need to dig up my actual plans for that one and maybe tweak them, to make sure it's not going to be a problem to do it in a Left Hand Magic month (I remember the renders giving me some trouble the first time around). But, tentatively, that's the one I'm picking from the two tied results! 

Short Story

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Alyia and the Magic Shop: 103.33

An App for That: 62.5

Mass Effect: Final Error: 60.5

The Long Haul: 30

Andrea of the Silver Key: 20.33

The Naughty Aunt's Notebook: 10

Lyriel's Adventures: 3.33

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So...I totally called this one a few days ago. Well, sort of. By unweighted numbers it was a dead heat between Mass Effect: Final Error and Alyia and the Magic Shop at the time I made my guess. Which, given that ME:FE actually ended up taking third to An App for That, shows you how much the weighting of the poll does matter. At any rate, Alyia and the Magic Shop took a clear victory!

As you might already be guessing from the combination of me saying I called it and my previous admittance that I was/am already working on a short...I've already been working on the next Alyia and the Magic Shop. In point of fact, it's pretty far along. I've got just shy of 3500 words on it already, with another 1-1.5k to go, I think. I'm expecting it to come in somewhere between 4,500-5,000 words. So, pretty typical length. Unless something comes up, I plan to finish it within the next two days or so. Not sure which story I'm going to work on as the second short for the month, yet.

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Other Progress Reports

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Kinda already covered the short story and MMS progress in the poll results. So...here's the other stuff...

Left Hand Magic

Gotta be honest. This took a sharp turn for the worse after my previous progress report. I thought I'd be done with Talia's solo-content by this morning. Instead, the still renders which I thought were going to be quick and easy have turned into a bloody nightmare. It took a full day and dozens of re-renders to finish just three stills for one of her scenes. And it took another full day to finish ONE still for another. Which...actually isn't even done yet. And I still have an animation to do. ARRRG.

I'm afraid that the issue is asset related. Apparently, Daz3D doesn't play nice when you have multiple 'shells' overlaying on the same figure. After hours upon hours of fiddling, trying to figure out what was going on and then trying to fix it, I finally realized I was going to have to use two assets separately on the same figure, then combined them via post processing. The attached image with the tentacle-mermaid lady? That's the results of one such composite. Though I haven't cleaned it up yet, just knocked the basics together real quick to show off the result. The mermaid tail and the arms are both assets that use 'shell' overlays...and they conflicted with each other badly. So they were rendered completely separately, then combined. I included the uncombined versions so you can see what I mean.

This all was farther complicated as the second scene of the week...takes place underwater. I've only done that a couple of times before, and it was terrible every time. I thought I'd gotten an asset that would fix that. Only to discover that the seller very much oversold it. Net result on the second scene being that I'm suffering through long render times...on renders I need to double up on to combined their shells afterward -_-. Hopefully, the single extra day this has so far cost me will be the extent of the damage...but that animation is planned to be underwater -_-. So, I have zero clues how that is going to work out. Ugh. At least this is all happening relatively early in the month when there's a chance to catch back up still...

Wallpapers:

Um...ironically, this time it wasn't just procrastination? I've been cursing and struggling with the renders for Left Hand Magic so much, that I legit forgot to do the post processing and typesetting for the wallpapers T-T. I'll try to get it done soon.