(WIP) Status Update

I began working on a small animation to fill the large empty space between posts. Consider this post more like an info post than a WIP one.

CA10 - I've finished animating the hardest part. Meanwhile, I didn't manage to finish it in two weeks. Mainly due to its increased duration, as it's 24s long instead of 15s max. These extra 9 seconds are exactly why it takes more time than I planned. Why did I make it more than 15 seconds long? In its main loop, there is a tentacle which takes roughly 8 seconds to make a full cycle. Making it cycle only twice will make the animation look too repetitive, so I made it cycle 3 times, which made animation look better. And yep, I still can't show you what it is.

A16 - I still haven't started animating it, as I was working on the effect I mentioned. I've tried multiple ways to achieve it, and none of them are worth using. A few ones work fast, but the results are totally off. Other few others give somewhat useful results, but require a ton of calculations, resulting in 1-2 minute-long bakes for 1 frame, which isn't useful for long animations.
I plan to use it not only in A16, so I need to make sure it's usable in longer animations, and make sure it's user-friendly as well. I've plans to make it public.

I made a good try in GeoNodes, but it lacks a few key things and already shows poor performance. At least I learned how I need to do it, and I began rewriting it from scratch. For now, rewritten version looking promising, but I still can't be sure if I manage to make what I need. There is a reason why no one was trying to make this effect.

??? (This animation) - As I said before, this is a small looped animation. It will be released soon, maybe even today if I finally make an environment models library. I got used to making workarounds to make it deform better in places where the last short animation was a failure. What you see here is what you'll see in Unreal, there is no more animation loss when exporting to Unreal.

R1 (New Hoodwink model) - Can't really say anything. There is quite a big list of what needs to be done. And I didn't do anything from this list while using the model in production. The model iteration I had (and am using now) from Comms Open post is sturdy as hell. It didn't break even once, unlike the original one, where you were forced to fix it ASAP. Even broken as hell normal maps don't affect final results much. I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

And I have one last thing to say. I'm thinking about making "seasonal events" where I create animations with other characters instead of Hoodwink. From time to time, I get an inspiration to do animation with a character from another game or universe. As CA9 shows, making an animation with characters and environments from different universes can be useful. Currently, I'm interested in WoW stuff as I want to know how most posters and animations are made and why they all look like cinematics straight from the game. The next short looped animation will be without Hoodwink.