Progress Report - August 19, 2024

Hello, everyone!

Let's just start things off hot and heavy:

Click here to watch a 36-second WIP preview with sound!

Yep, as you all probably figured from that, I've gotten most all of the audio in! All of the audio sans Pharah's and Ana's has been submitted, processed, and installed. The last audio was slated to come in today, but Bordeaux ran into hardware problems that she only managed to get resolved earlier this evening. She's expecting to have the audio for me within 24 hours, though.

As you can hear from this clip though, both SilkyMilk's DVa and MidnightDatura's Symmetra are sounding as fantastic as ever. And ya'll haven't heard nothin' yet.

Once Bordeaux's audio comes in, I will finally be able to adjust the timings on everything and lock in a final mix on the audio. Then I kick out an updated runtime render to send off to my sound designer, as I work on lip-syncing everything and then finalizing the animation.

As you can see, I've got this particular sequence lip-synced, though I haven't finalized the motion yet. So outside of key gestures and emotions, everything is still extremely stiff. You'll also notice that Symmetra's arm gesture is not synchronized with her dialogue yet. That is because Symmetra's dialogue is dependent on Pharah's (that's how conversations work, I'm told), evidenced by the placeholder subtitles for Pharah. Exactly where Symmetra's audio is placed depends on how long Pharah takes to talk - if Pharah takes 5 seconds to say something, then Symmetra's response should be 6 seconds in; if Pharah takes 3 seconds, the response 4 seconds in; you get the idea.

Moving the lip-sync around for Symmetra is easy enough, but I figured I'd not bother moving the arm if I'm just going to have to move it again. Once I have Pharah's audio in place, I will know the final position for Symmetra's audio, and then I can move her arm animation to fit.

And then, more importantly, I can cut the clip shorter so there aren't long awkward silences, or stretch the clip longer so the sounds don't run into each other, as necessary. And I can tell you already, just from the dialogue clips I already have, there is going to be a lot of adjusting clip runtimes.

I do my best to guesstimate how long dialogue will take to deliver, but at the end of the day, it is just a guesstimate. That's all just par the course though.

Assuming that Bordeaux is able to get her audio in to me by tomorrow night, then I expect to have her audio fully processed and installed by start-of-day Thursday. Then hopefully I will have all of the clips adjusted by start-of-day Sunday, and I will have the final runtime render out and assembled by start-of-day Monday, to ship off to my sound designer.

Which means that by end-of-day Monday the 26th , I should have a complete (but unmixed) audio solution I could extract teasers from for you all. The animation will still be work-in-progress, and there likely won't be full lip-sync for those teasers, but everything else should be in place.

Then I'm assuming a week to lip-sync everything, meaning that by Monday September 2nd I should be ready to finalize animation. Assume another week for that, and by Monday September 9th I should be ready to kick out the final 4k render. Hopefully two weeks will be enough time for my sound designer to get everything done, so that we can release on Friday September 13th. Can't pass up a Friday the 13th, provided the opportunity presents itself!

Again, this is not a commitment to a release date. There's lots that can go wrong. I will, as always, keep you all updated on how things are going and how it stacks up to this tentative schedule.

But we're quickly getting into the final stretch of things now! I'm pretty damn excited. I hope you all, too!

Until next week, everyone!