August 2019 - W.I.P UPDATE

 FEATURE ANIMATION: LIFEGUARD x STITCH: SOMETHING ABOUT FRUIT

Hello Everyone,

Oh my days loyal patreon supporters, what a month it has been! Principle animation, done. Lights, 99% done. Corrective animation, 99% done. Grass 100% done. Rendering, 25% done. That's right, we've started rendering since all the lighting and corrective stuff I have left to do is right at the end the first 15 minutes are ready to go. I'm getting 1 minute of animation done in 2 hours 40 minutes so I'm doing it in 1-2 minute batches during the night while I'm asleep so as not to hammer my graphics card for 20 hour render sessions. I've got 7 minutes fully rendered and put together in adobe and I'm very happy with it. I get 8 FPS playback in SFM with the lights on so it's actually the first time I'm seeing it properly.

I've got two days coming up where I can spend all day working on it so it seems likely that I'll be able to get everything done during those days and start on the corrections I need to make to the first 7 minutes I finished and rendered a year ago. I should have all 30 minutes finished and ready to go by the end of the month so hopefully, the next WIP will be the last one that says - Something About Fruit and the October one will instead read - Mei in: Overcast. 

ELDAR NARN

Eldar Narn Chapter 3 concluded this month and I've got the first few pages of Chapter 4 done but as of yet they haven't gone up. I want to get a few pages in first and have a chance to deploy the lights from a few different angles before I fully commit. At this early stage in a chapter I'm trying to go back a lot and make changes to the lighting to make sure it looks good from multiple angles. While I am happy with the lighting in Chapter 3 on a panel by panel basis, I think one of the problems with the lights in Chapter 3 has been inconsistency with them changing quite significantly from page to page. I'm going to try to be more careful this time around to keep the lighting more consistent. This coupled with the fact that the animation is receiving the majority of my attention at the moment means Chapter 4 might take a little longer to get going, but most of the really hard work has been done already so it shouldn't take too long. I will put Chapter 4 page 1 up very soon so everyone can get a little peek.

Other than the somewhat differing lights I'm pleased with Chapter 3. Tried some more adventurous motion blur scenes. Some worked, some didn't but I always learnt something. Gizzi's mom was a really pain to work with since she has almost no facial bones so getting any kind of expression out of her is a real chore. She was never really that important to the main story anyway so she shouldn't be much of a problem moving forward, but she may still see her role somewhat diminished due to the fact that she pisses me off. 

So that's the long and the short of it for August. It's been a supremely successful month, we're practically done. I'm very confident that the next WIP will be very short and will merely say: We're Done.

Goodbye Friends,