Dev Log #9 | Animation

I really have no idea what to use as a picture. Everything would be a spoiler in some way. So this post will need to come without one. Sorry.

Anyway, on to the main topic. Animation.

Up until now I have tried to animate as much as possible for MIST and I think I did a decent job with it. I was generally happy with the results, but things changed. They got better!

Over the past few weeks I, for no particular reason, began to look a bit more into the VFX workflow of 3D art. That stuff is a lot different from games and is obviously much closer tied to filmmaking. Which makes it approach everything a bit differently. Everything is supposed to make that single shot the camera can see look perfect. Anything around it doesn't matter, only what you see needs to look as good as possible. So lots of "trickery" is involved.

Because it doesn't matter. They choose what you can see, so they can do the tricks. Which ultimately just makes great looking movies. And that approach is true for MIST aswell. Ren'Py is a visual novel engine and not like Unity or Unreal. I choose what the camera shows you, there is no other way. Which also gives me the freedom to use shortcuts and tricks to deliver the best quality in a good amount of time.

That made me think a lot more about my camera angles, the way I frame the scenes, throw shadows on objects, use light to make things interesting. Now don't get me wrong. I was always tring to keep all of those in mind anyway, but I got a little bit of a new perspective to achieve my goals.

One of which is animation. Up until now I was just doing it. I was just animating things. That's pretty much it. But now I finally came around to learn a bit more about the theory of animation and let me tell you, that helped a lot! The way things move in a stylized environment is different from reality. And I didn't know about the ways others had already invented to make 3D animation look good. Now I have an Idea and I promise you will see what I mean by that in the next update. The two new scenes are exciting.

Now I obviously haven't learned all, I am just at the very starting line of animation, but the results are already quite good looking. I will look into new ressources, to learn about proper animation and further increase my toolset. Another factor is my new GPU. I kind of forgot to tell you about it and only noticed when a Patron asked me. I did get a new GPU after saving for quite some time and it is really allowing me to push more stuff out. My render times went down by at least 60%.