Episode 9 Progress - 6/7/19 (Patreon)

Hello friends.  This week's update is slightly delayed, because I had to be sure this was the case:  All character animation is now complete.  Due to the length of the episode, I had to go through it several times to confirm I'd fixed everything.  I found quite a bit of stuff that I missed the first time around.  And every time I fixed stuff I had to re-render everything and check it again.  It's been a very long and tedious process, but the most time consuming piece of this episode is now complete, and I'm very happy with it.

For the next few days, I'll be locking down the cameras.  Fortunately, I've laid a very solid groundwork for myself, so this will just be a lot of fine-tuning.  Thanks to your generous support, I was able to purchase a camera add-on for Blender that's made the process a lot more streamlined and will produce very professional looking results.

And now we're about to enter the final stage of the process: visual effects.  I'm not going to lie: I'm coming into very new territory here.  I'm quite inexperienced with Blender particle systems, and several of them are crucial to the episode, such as fire and water.  In fact, one of the main reasons I switched to Blender for this episode is because I'd have a hard time achieving some of these effects in Source Filmmaker.

Fortunately, I've already gotten started on most of them.  In between working on character animation, I've been watching several tutorials and testing the Blender plugins I bought in order to achieve these effects.  I'm already way ahead on bubbles, water, and dust.  A lot of the plugins have made the process a lot simpler for me, and a some of the particle systems are pretty similar to SFM, but I am still quite inexperienced with a lot of it.  However, my policy has always been "write what you want to make, regardless of whether or not you know how to do it."  Every episode thus far, I've written in something that I didn't know how to make, then I learned how to make it out of necessity.  Not only has this given me the results I wanted, but it's also taught me valuable skills that I continue to use to better my content.  I really hope it's worth it this time around, because I got way too ambitious in writing some of this stuff... Ugh...  

Anyway, thanks for your continued support.  I really really don't think I'd be where I am today without you guys.

Shipp