Well, somebody from here reported gumdrop to patreon towards the end of February and patreon did nothing to his page.
As for the animations, what fatcat offers as a service is posing the animations -- placing models, adding movements and so on. This is tedious work that requires attention to detail and so on, so even if you can do very nice still renders yourself, your animations may be utter crap. Animation commissions are pricey, but if the animation is done well, it pays for itself, so to speak.
The result of the work of an animator are just descriptions for a renderer to place models and how to animate them frame by frame. There will usually be a suggested viewport as well (in some cases the viewport needs to be fixed because there's nothing beyond the frame). The final work depends on the quality of rendering you opt for. You can add occlusions, depth of field, and so on, but in the end, if you want, say, full HD quality, and a full HD frame takes 30 minutes to render, a 4 minute movie in 60 fps is 14400 frames, which translates to 7200 hours of rendering or 300 days 24/7.
You can pre-render parts of a scene which makes the animation render faster (if your software is able to take advantage of this), but those are very small gains, and you really need two orders of magnitude faster processing if you're serious about adding animations to your game. If you can rent appropriate processing power in the cloud, it starts being viable.
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As for my take about the delay of part X, gumdrop got lazy and his work ethics went downhill around part 6-8, where he already had 1-2 month delays releasing new parts. Then it's this long hiatus where people still want to throw money at him for no work done (and it's the same people -- the drop at the beginning of the month is denied payments which are then manually retried), and gumdrop starts getting money for nothing and keeps promising the moon. Once patrons started leaving, he began promising more and more features to explain his obvious lack of progress, all until he promised animation mid-last year and commissioned fatcat. I didn't realize it was a 4 minute animation (they're typically 30 seconds long, usually much shorter). If it's that long, gumdrop has no chance of making his May deadline (unless he goes for really low resolution).
And it's all self-inflicted. He should have just went on with a monthly, or even bi-monthly schedule, maybe take three-four months for part X, if wrapping up the story is that much longer and don't promise animations that most of his patrons didn't care for at all. Instead, he now put a lot more work ahead of him that can never be completed.
As for the animations, what fatcat offers as a service is posing the animations -- placing models, adding movements and so on. This is tedious work that requires attention to detail and so on, so even if you can do very nice still renders yourself, your animations may be utter crap. Animation commissions are pricey, but if the animation is done well, it pays for itself, so to speak.
The result of the work of an animator are just descriptions for a renderer to place models and how to animate them frame by frame. There will usually be a suggested viewport as well (in some cases the viewport needs to be fixed because there's nothing beyond the frame). The final work depends on the quality of rendering you opt for. You can add occlusions, depth of field, and so on, but in the end, if you want, say, full HD quality, and a full HD frame takes 30 minutes to render, a 4 minute movie in 60 fps is 14400 frames, which translates to 7200 hours of rendering or 300 days 24/7.
You can pre-render parts of a scene which makes the animation render faster (if your software is able to take advantage of this), but those are very small gains, and you really need two orders of magnitude faster processing if you're serious about adding animations to your game. If you can rent appropriate processing power in the cloud, it starts being viable.
--
As for my take about the delay of part X, gumdrop got lazy and his work ethics went downhill around part 6-8, where he already had 1-2 month delays releasing new parts. Then it's this long hiatus where people still want to throw money at him for no work done (and it's the same people -- the drop at the beginning of the month is denied payments which are then manually retried), and gumdrop starts getting money for nothing and keeps promising the moon. Once patrons started leaving, he began promising more and more features to explain his obvious lack of progress, all until he promised animation mid-last year and commissioned fatcat. I didn't realize it was a 4 minute animation (they're typically 30 seconds long, usually much shorter). If it's that long, gumdrop has no chance of making his May deadline (unless he goes for really low resolution).
And it's all self-inflicted. He should have just went on with a monthly, or even bi-monthly schedule, maybe take three-four months for part X, if wrapping up the story is that much longer and don't promise animations that most of his patrons didn't care for at all. Instead, he now put a lot more work ahead of him that can never be completed.
