Progress Report - March 31, 2025

Hello, everyone!

I didn't quite manage to make my goal for this week, but it wasn't for a lack of trying. I was aspiring to get the whole of the studio scene finished by today, so I could send it out for dubbing. I did manage to get the sequence up to when the animation loops I had shown off last week come into play, though, which is a significant inroad into the effort.

However, my PC woes have decided to rear their ugly head again, and roughly half the week was spent fighting constant lockups once more. And this time, my PC has learned a fancy new trick - sometimes, instead of a lockup, it will just do a blip-restart (sudden flash to black as it immediately cycles power). Just to shake things up, keep me on my toes.

At this point, I am becoming increasingly convinced it is a power supply problem. I started suspected it all the way back in November 2024, when the lockups first started up. In fact, I even went and bought a new PSU the day that it locked up 17 days in a row. But I never got around to installing it, because by the time the new PSU arrived, the PC had started behaving itself again, and didn't start acting up until a few weeks ago - nearly half a year after the fact.

So I have a brand new PSU still in its box sitting the corner of my room. I'm thinking I will probably end up cracking it out and swapping the damn thing sometime later this week.

On top of the lockups, I had another surprise adventure in technical complications this week. Last week, I locked in the Marie/Helena Micro video. I got VoiceLikeCandy and InsideIncognita on-board for reprising their roles as Marie and Helena respectively, as well as a male voice talent whose currently in the process of figuring out a performance name for crediting purposes.

Yesterday, said male voice talent sent in his audio for me to check out. I intended to spend a quick 10 seconds dropping the audio onto the project in SFM and making sure it all aligned. Only for the project to immediately crash-to-desktop the moment I added audio to it.

What followed was over two hours of me experimenting with deleting different things from the scene and seeing what triggers the crash and what doesn't. I found that I can't have Helena, Honoka, and the guy all in the project file at the same time. Any two of them have to be deleted from the entire project file in order to get the audio to not instantly crash SFM.

As I'm sure you can imagine, that isn't exactly ideal. Helena, Honoka, and the guy are all rather important to the video. Deleting them from the scene isn't exactly viable. But that is the only solution I've found to stop the project file from instantly crashing the moment I add audio to it.

The hackneyed solution I've settled upon is to have four separate versions of the project file: one that doesn't have Helena or the guy and has audio, one that doesn't have Helena or Honoka and has audio, one that doesn't have the guy or Honoka, and one that has everyone but has no audio.

I will then have to process, lip-sync, and animate the audio for each character in their own unique file: Helena in one, Honoka in the other, the guy in the third. And then merge all of their resulting animation into the project file that has everyone but no audio.

It is an absolute logistical nightmare, and figuring out all the hoops I have to jump through in order to pull this off completely drained me yesterday. So I didn't get nearly as much work on Batcat done as I had wanted.

Recall this was all supposed to be a quick 10-second check.

I am hoping to finish off the apartment sequence by end-of-day Friday. Tomorrow morning, I intend to nudge Milly and Innie and see if I can't get the non-dub audio from them before Friday, letting them know about the imminent dub and my goal of doing a work trade--they give me recordings to animate, I give them animation to record over.

I will be out of town this weekend, so that's about all I am projecting forward for right now.

Progress is overall ticking along pretty well. I was originally hoping for an early-April release of the video, but preproduction ended up taking a lot longer than I wanted it to, and all of these technical problems aren't making things any easier. But I'm feeling like an end-of-April release is definitely on the cards.

Before I sign off the week, I offer a WIP of everything done so far! Click here to watch the full 2:20 animated so far. It is very much still unfinished, just blocking animation without the scene or lighting being built. But it contains all of the core motion, and I think you can already see the natural evolution from the storyboard to final product.

That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!