2022 Approach: Retrospective, Catching Up, and Organizing (Patreon)

Already closing up on the new year, huh? Got a big read-up for 2022 if you have the time to spare!

There were a lot of unpredictable factors that threw off the release schedule so I'm going to try offsetting a few projects to make room for random possibilities. For the beginning of 2022 I'm going to use about a month to catch up on the poll animations lagging behind and get them pushed out.

First priority after that is tackling the roadmap and finally knocking the the list down. Models need to get quality of life adjustments, scenes need to get their shaders updated, lighting overhauled, footage polished, etc.

Poll Animations

Poll animations were great to keep pumping stuff out but it came with the cost of roadmap projects seeing less progress. To meet a quality standard it meant models and edits had to be prepared and made presentable, as well as setting up environments from the games they come from with painstaking manual work, animated/rendered, my personal life and days off, and getting voice done for the video which can take up to a week or more to receive - all within that month. For a lot of series and games this meant building model libraries completely from scratch due to lack of initial resources.

The time I spent polishing and redoing footage wasn't nearly as fast so the workload eventually spilled over towards the year's end. To avoid burnout and hopefully keep things on track, animation polls will likely be made less frequent in 2022 but to even this out there will be polls to decide additional scenes for current in-progress and future animations.

VR

I want to convert some animations to VR every once in a while. There's a lot of back-and-forth testing, calibrating, filling in behind the camera details, rendering at high resolutions, etc. The perceived sense of scale through stereoscopy is different scene by scene and needs careful adjusting to feel natural.

It took me about a week or two and several render attempts to finally figure out how things worked so now I have the know-how and experience. The rendering engine I use doesn't natively support VR at the moment so there will be some visual differences in the renders to remove seams at the footage stitching edges.

Commissions

There's a few things I need to wrap up first but I'm exploring this on the side with patrons. More on that later through 2022.

Long Animations & Motion Capture

In the last update I mentioned motion capture equipment finally coming in around late January 2022. Its primary use is going to be assisting full body motion that's difficult to keyframe by hand and, in practice, up the production and cinematic quality.

For animations this could mean longer, and more elaborate intros/slice of life elements, stuff like that.

A Few Notes On Animations

The VA I wanted for Camilla has been on hiatus for a few months. I'll be checking in again at some point but her animation might have to be pushed back for a while. If need be I can find a suitable replacement for the role but the actress I initially planned on getting is extremely close in her voice imitation, so it would be a bummer if that doesn't go through.

The FE3H shader and lighting adjustments will be applied to all the scenes and some adjustments to the models will be made. Adapting them might take a little bit but after that the animations are back to steady progress.

Ice mom stuff will be gearing back on full track after wrapping up overdue projects running behind.

In Conclusion

Thank you for your support and patience. It's a learning process gauging my own capacity and performance, and I realize putting all those items so close together in the previous roadmap was wishful thinking and overestimating my abilities, plus excitement with the new rendering engine, so we'll take things on as we go. 

There's still a ton I want to animate so please look forward to it, and I look forward to your continued support! Have a happy New Year!