Getting Tina wet, Rainy magic, reducing render times and dialgoues! - Little Update inbetween!

Yo,

Just wanted to show you guys some progress for the final scene since I'm only just now able to animate the remaining shots due to the preparations for the environment and models that were required.

Fortunately for us, there are guys out there who built nice little particle systems (SFMs integrated system for animated objects/effects) as you can see with the rain in the gif.
It just took some time to tweak the parameters (radius, animation rate, thickness of the drops) so it looks right with the lighting and the forest. It looks way better than the cop scene from DM1 if you ask me :)
Only problem that I have to fix here is to get the trees and branches look wet. Normally I would just type in a certain command and the material appears more glossy but I noticed just when the rain was all configured that they seem to have no normal- or bumpmap (meaning no parameters to change material appearance possible) which is pretty much the first time that happened to me after 4 years of animation with this software but eh, it will be figured out.

Next on the angenda was to make SFM less laggy. We're using .. countless objects with this fuckin forest over here so I checked all the props, the trees, the branches, the building and the floor tiles whether I can reduce the amount of vertices (basically polygons) or not.
Just to give you a reference. Tina's base model have like 16.000 vertices in total, which is pretty common for NSFW models.
Now, I want you to take a guess what a fucking simple floor tile could possibly put on the counter? 1000? 2000? Heh.


I don't know WHAT the creator of this was thinking with this one. Thankfully, we got it down to 30k without altering the shape of the mesh itself too much but holy shit, this would have been render hell with the countless tiles that are spread across the map D:

Needless to say, our models have to adjust to the weather:


Thankfully, this was quite easy. Just had to get Tina's hair right and some changes were made with her clothing as well.

The other model was a bit more complex... that's all I'll say for now ;)

As you probably know, writing isn't really my expertise and it sure isn't easier doing that being a non-native english speaker..

But I've put more time in getting the last dialogue right.. to the best I can at least :D

For future projects, someone more knowledgeable than me in terms of cinematography and writing will probably help me if not completely take over this task for me. I was way too stubborn the entire time to outsource any tasks whatsoever but that's just dumb when there are people who are more skilled than myself in that area.
Same goes for creating/editing models. It's crazy how much time this shit takes while there are people in this sphere who could do that for me instead while I could just animate in the meantime.

Oh well, lesson learned, moving on >:)

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet