Progress Report - July 17, 2025 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for this being so late to post. I originally meant to make the post yesterday, but time got away from me. Before we get into the post proper, I do want to say something up front:

My mum is currently in the hospital for heart-related things again. At this moment in time, it is nothing critical - but they also don't know why she is having heart-related issues, and so it is possible that things may turn critical as they do more tests. Depending on how things pan out, I may be called away to help my family. I may not. I will let you all know as I learn more.

I just wanted to drop that now, so that in the event of my needing to be suddenly pulled away, it doesn't come as a surprise. Without going into too many details there, the context is that my mother went to the local hospital after experiencing another mini-stroke (dizziness, blurred vision, loss of balance, etc). While there, they did routine bloodwork, and her high-sensitivity troponin levels were 2300 (normal values are below 14, and anything above 45 is considered "heart is under stress"). They immediately airlifted her to Seattle, because my parents' local hospital isn't equipped to deal with cardiac issues. They did preliminary tests that didn't see any obvious signs of or causes for heart damage, and are currently exploring other possibilities to explain the troponin levels.

With that being said, onto the report itself:

As I mentioned in last week's report, I pulled the trigger on July 15, hell or high water. In the end, I managed to get a rudimentary detail pass done on everything, and a very rough emotive pass on everything. It's certainly not to the standard of work I usually hold myself to, and I suspect everyone will be able to tell the exact frame where I gave up on the project - the animation quality noticeably falls off a cliff.

But it is what it is. As we all decided through discussion and polling, I just need to get this project out the door and move on to other projects. And so, that's exactly what we're doing.

Last week, I stated of the Batcat renders:

Returning to Batcat going out the door, I am not going to be particularly rushed on its renders, either. I'm just going to let it render overnight, and I am going to spend the days working on Overbreed Episode 1. I think I am going to focus on just getting as much core animation for it made as possible.

This was posted under the expectation of the render taking on the order of 30 hours, spaced over 3 or so days.

When I wrote last week's post, I was not fully cognizant of just how powerful this new CPU I am running (in the wake of my motherboard dying some weeks back, as you all may recall the weeks-long delayed it incurred and the fun and exciting shadow-demon adventures of trying to work on my backup machine).

What I expected to take 30 hours to render, ended up taking less than 12.

I had started the render before going to bed on July 15. It was finished by dinner time the next day, on July 16. As such, I did not manage to get any work on Overbreed done.

I still have a few things to do ahead of the video's release, most notably getting the final sound design installed and then the logistics of uploading and releasing. That shouldn't take more than a few days.

As I have stated previously, the video will be released with 2160p, 1080p, and 720p versions all simultaneously. The 720p public version will be free as always, and the 2160p and 1080p tiers will both be knocked down one tier from their usual rackets - the 2160p version will release at the $10 tier normally for 1080p, and the 1080p version will release at the $5 tier normally for Progress Reports (without early access). This is because I do not have faith in the project and I did not properly finish it to my usual standards, so it seems unfair to ask usual fares for it. That being said, it did still cost me a fair amount to produce, and so I would like to at least recoup some of those costs.

As I mentioned in the previous two Progress Reports, my immediate focus now is going to be getting the Frozen video at a point it can be rendered, and then get that underway. There is no better time to pursue an abandon-release than immediately after another abandon-release. Get two albatrosses off from around my neck at the same time.

From there, I want to work on building some infrastructure for working in Blender, and then return my focus to Overbreed Episode 1. With the Shorts being jettisoned from the schedule, the plan is to chip away at it until it is completed.

I will continue to explore writing and producing Micro videos in the meantime, during my off-hours.

The only last thing I really have to say for this week's Progress Report is that I am kinda disgusted at how cleanly the VFX compositing for this video went, considering how little effort I put into it and the fact it is an abandon release. It's certainly not perfect, but at least to my eye, the TV screen compositing more than passes a cursory glance.

I did take the time to experiment a bit, and I found that I can use low-quality 720p renders to do the VFX compositing on, and then swap out the source footage with high-quality 2160p renders, and all of the compositing remains and properly scales up. That was very neat to see, and will definitely be useful knowledge going forward.

With that being said, that's all for now. I expect the video will be ready for release around the same time as next week's Progress Report. So it may end up being a double-feature post next week. It might not. We'll see.

Until next week, everyone!