Progress Report - Friday, November 20, 2020 - Rachaos Asset Preproduction Concludes!

Hey everyone!

So, hilariously, I planned to put together this post yesterday, officially announcing that I had finally finished producing assets for the Rachaos short. But then I finished rewriting the beginning of the screenplay, and out of that fell the realization I needed to produce another asset.

But that is done now, and I think I am actually done producing assets! Rachaos is hands-down the most preproduction-heavy short I've done to date. That honor previously belonged to Rabbit.Hole Episode 3, which required the creation of 3 new characters.

Rachaos, however, ended up with 7 new characters being built. Not all of them are human, and not all of them are fully kitted, but they are still 7 unique characters will full rigging. From left to right, they are:

• Treasure hunter
• Champion hunter
• Chaos True Form
• Nyotengu
• Rachel
• Chaos Fiend Form
• Chaos Fantasy Form (x2)

Additionally, I also had to create 4 new outfits for Rachaos:

• Nyotengu's “Steampunk” outfit
• Rachel's “Fetish” outfit
• Generic DOAFantasy’s “Chaos Fantasy” outfit
• Generic Male’s “Villager” outfit.

As if all of this weren't enough, there was also a fair bit of nontraditional work that went into the asset production:

• Chaos True Form was co-developed with a tool that will allow for animating his glow to accentuate his speech (and I am experimenting with a tool for animating pupil dilation for even more expression)
• Rachel's Fetish outfit bafflingly refused to take on Bodymorph capabilities correctly. I ended up spending the better part of a week fighting it and working with someone with intimate knowledge of the compiler’s source code, before giving up and working around it by compiling each and every piece of the outfit as a separate model. That wasn’t fun.
• The Generic DOAFantasy asset was codeveloped with a tool that randomized the face shape, eye-color, hair-style, hair-color, and skin-color. And because I am a genius who absolutely avoids stress at all costs, rather than going with the game-developer solution of “here are your 5-preset skin tones you can choose from,” I wrote a complex algorithm that dynamically generates the skin tones through pure, raw mathematics—no presets or hard-coded colors to be found. And then I did it again for the hair colors, because the skin-tone generator taking 3 days to work out simply wasn’t enough to break me.
• The male villager outfit is highly colorable, with the hood, shirt, vest, cloak, pants and bracers all individually colorable. Combine with the pre-existing male randomizer I’ve already been using it, and the handful of bodygroups the villager outfit comes with, and this allows for a fair bit of variety with the villager asset without needing to build even more outfits.

I know that Rachaos has had an abnormally long preproduction cycle, technically starting mid-September and beginning in earnest mid-October. But I think, with this retrospective in mind, the long timeframe begins to make sense.

Of course, I’ve also had other things taking time away from Rachaos preproduction. The Blue Star poster and assembling of assets for the announcement, the DOAFACU poster I still need to finish (that is actually my plan for the weekend), the Marie/Helena on-stream video entering the rendering stage, and putting together proposals for the next on-stream video project (I have a few I still need to formally write out and propose, beyond the DVa project I’ve already proposed).

It’s been a busy month, despite not having much to outwardly show for it. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, though.

With asset production finally done for Rachaos, though, the next thing to do is finally finish the screenplay. I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the existing revisions I have shared previously, specifically the set-up. Explaining the Psychomorph was particularly bothersome, as the elusive “Innkeeper” character needed to have their assets, voicing, and role resolved.

In the end, after much contemplation, DancesWithWolves and I decided to replace the Innkeeper with Nyotengu, who was already planned to be in the video anyways. Consolidating the roles is more efficient in every way possible—narratively, asset-wise, and voicing-wise—and allows for an overall tighter narrative.

Toward that end, we also refactored the context of the scene slightly. Instead of Rachel being a bounty hunter specializing in fiends, she is now part of a fiend-hunting sect. And instead of Chaos being an elusive bounty, he is now an elusive target. The rest of the story remains unchanged, and the details are ultimately unimportant.

I have not made any forward progress on the screenplay yet. That is my goal for this next week, and I am hoping that next Thursday’s report will have a first draft of the final screenplay. It’s going to be a long one—I will be surprised if it clocks in at under 100 shots.

Until then, though, I've attached the latest screenplay revision to the bottom of this post. It includes the changes to the beginning and context. As always, I am open to any and all feedback, be it criticisms, suggestions, or just expressing thoughts.

See you again next week, everyone!