THE END IS NEAR!! Update on Prologue for “Adventures of a Changed Boy” – February 4, 2019
(as posted on our Patreon Page)
The end is near, thank God!!
After a very
LONG week, spent rendering and dealing with some Patreon issues, I am pleased to report that I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!
I still have 2 animations to finish rendering, then stuff it all into a folder and send it off to Palanto to begin doing his programing magic, while I finish rendering the character dialogue portraits and then I need to work on redoing the Patreon ‘Tier’ images to replace the ones that I was asked to take down.
All-in-all, despite some setbacks, last week was pretty productive… so I am pretty upbeat.
I can’t thank my employer enough for giving me last week off, well… for the most part, he did call a couple of times towards to end of the week to make sure I was coming back and not quitting on their projects… but, really grateful for the time to just focus on
ONE task, rather than several at a time.
Here is a peek at the progress that was made...
I am
REALLY looking forward, however, to a time when my wife can return (hopefully in March), as I am finding the current workflow of me having to do the poses to be quite time consuming and labor intensive.
Prior to her job calling her away from this project (and me), the workflow went like this…
- Jack creates areas, scenery and dresses the characters in that release…
- Jack then does the story break downs…
- Wife creates poses based on break downs, while Jack writes story script…
- Jack loads characters into scene, applies poses and clicks renders…
- While scene renders, Jack copies text out of MS Word, pastes it into Twine…
- Jack makes edits to render, lists image number(s) used in that Twine page…
- Wash, Rinse and Repeat till done…
- Wife does quick edits to Jack’s writing…
- Jack zips everything up and send to Palanto…
- Palanto further does edits to Jack’s writing if need and imports everything in program framework…
- Palanto tests, Jack tests… get thumbs up, uploads and is then released to all of you.
While it may seem, from that workflow that the wife doesn’t do much, I have learned (and think other 3D creators can attest) the most time-consuming part, besides waiting on the renders, is the posing of the characters, without breaks and making sure the expressions are nice…
I miss the wife’s work on the project because, to me, it feels like the workflow is broken… as I am now doing the character’s posing on the fly in the scene, so got to make sure that there’s no mesh breaks… that the poses look as natural as possible and the other problems that results from using a program that doesn’t really have collision detection.
Anyhow, just thought I would share the process with all of you and reiterate how much I miss having her take care of that one part, which… I think… is, perhaps, the most important piece to the process!
Well, best get back to the remaining two renders and get this to Palanto… got to get this into all of your hands and the Patreon Tier section to redo.
Talk soon!
~Jack