Progress Report - October 8, 2024

Hello, everyone!

Things are chugging along. I've gotten the first 12 minutes all jittered, with 3 minutes left to go. Gonna be a bit of a crapshoot as to how quickly those final 3 minutes will go, as half of them involve 4 characters (slows jitter down), but 2 of them are mostly just talking (speeds jitter up).

You can click here for a 30-second preview of the last few shots I've gotten jittered.

Either way though, I should most certainly have the jitter done by Friday evening. Then I go back through and animate the camera, before doing a final look-over pass for the lighting, hair-clipping, and anything I may have missed.

This Progress Report's render is the first I've done in a long time with the lighting on, since the first sweeping pass of applying the sweat values. I'm still not sure I'm happy with how the sweat is looking right now, but I can definitely tell I need to adjust the lighting to account for it. The rim lighting on Pharah damn near makes her glow with the sweat applied.

We're getting really close to a final render. Still not going to bother pinning a date down for it.

I suppose I will say right now, though, that I am not going to get hung up on any remaining little details. So things like Symmetra looking a bit goofy just looking at Pharah while she responds in the first shot of this preview. I could spend months chasing down every little detail, and the project will never be released. God only knows it's far overdue from what my original planned release date was.

As the saying goes, "perfect" is the enemy of "good enough." And I think, for the audiences who actually appreciate this kind of work, what I have now is "good enough." Because let's be frank, no one is coming to me looking for Pixar levels of perfect visual fidelity. That train passed SFM long ago.

My work is aimed toward audiences that appreciate more substantive content, where the reasons why characters are fucking and the conversations around them fucking is just as important (if not moreso) than the actual fucking itself.

With that being said: Till next week, everyone!