Progress Report - September 24, 2024

Hello, everyone.

Pharmmetra's still not done. Apparently, I grossly underestimated just how long the lewd-sound lip-syncing will take. I thought it'd take 2 or 3 days. We're approaching, like, 3 weeks now.

The project is split into 3 files, which I'll call Alpha, Beta, and Gamma for clarity. I have fully finished all of the lewd lip-syncing for Pharah and Symmetra across all three project files. Tracer and Emily only exist in Alpha and are completely lip-synced. Ana only exists in Gamma and is completely lip-synced. DVa is completely lip-synced in Alpha and Beta, and I am currently working through lip-syncing her for Gamma. Once she's fully lip-synced, then all of the lip-sync will finally be finished.

Each project file is 5 minutes in length, and I've only gotten the first minute of DVa's Gamma lip-sync done so far. I've been averaging maybe around 2 minutes of lip-sync a day. Factor in the fact that Thursday is my day off, and I'll hopefully finally be done by Friday.

But I'm not going to bother trying to project release dates anymore. It's just not working. I'm going back to the model that worked: It'll be done when it's done, and I'll keep you all updated as things move along.

To hold you all over, here is a 40-second WIP clip demonstrating just how much work is going into all of this lip-sync (and how frustratingly little of it you can actually see in the final product).

Click here to view it

The left viewport is locked to the active character's head, so you can clearly see the lip animation. The right viewport is what the actual camera sees. Along the bottom, I showed the active character's lip-sync animation, just to give an idea of just how many frames were put down.

And all of these frames were placed by hand. Even the ones that look copy-pasted are hand-placed, frame by frame, because the timing just doesn't allow for quickly propagating out animation.

And once again, this isn't final animation yet. The jitter animation which makes the characters feel more lively, as well as the camera choreography to make it all feel less stiff, is the very last thing to be done, due to its destructive nature.

The voice actresses did an absolutely fantastic job on this project. But I won't lie, I'm getting sick of hearing their squealing after weeks of nothing but hearing it for 8 hours a day 6 days a week for the past 3 weeks, split up into 0.04166-second increments, scrubbing back and forth constantly.

After this project is over, I need to spend some time looking into some way to automate generating lewd-sound lip-sync. Because this is just soul-draining work. It's not even fun lip-sync, like dialogue is. It's just literal noise.

To be perfectly clear, I am supremely unhappy with how long this is taking. I'm even more frustrated than all of you are about the delays and the waiting. I'm very pleased with the work as it's getting done. I just wish it was getting done faster. I want to be done with this project, and to move on with my life. The finish line has been in sight for weeks now, but every time I take two steps toward it, it slides a step back. It feels like I'm treading water. But it is what it is.

That's all for now. We'll get to the release eventually.