Rabbit.Hole Episode 2 - Preproduction Preview 2 - Meet the Fan! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

So I'm still in the thick of preproduction for Rabbit.Hole Episode 2. That's basically been the entire month. But I came into this knowing I'd have a metric fuck-ton of preproduction for the episode, and so I anticipated spending all of May preparing for it.

Majority of the week has been spent writing, editing, and revising the screenplay. After going through 3 major iterations, I think it is finally locked down. I got the finalized Korean translations an hour or so ago, but it's too late for me to go through them right now.

I am hoping to get the screenplay posted up for the Texts tier tomorrow.

I still have a bit of preproduction to do yet, but the worst of it is over. I spent pretty much all of today building the Awkward Fan here, the first of many notches that D.Va will be putting in her list of conquests throughout the series.

He's based on an unnamed background character from Bioshock Infinite (though, amusingly, all of the unnamed characters actually have names in the game files - everyone, meet Andrew!). I ended up modifying him pretty extensively to get him closer to the Overwatch aesthetic - smoothed and simplified face textures, larger eye meshes, and custom eyebrows I meshed by hand to better fit the aesthetic of the game. Oh, and he also has D.Va's teeth, too. Like I literally just copied her teeth and pasted them in his mouth, because the teeth he came with were fucking ugly.

I didn't anticipate building him to be a full-day venture, but he's done now. His faceposing is fully built, though I need to build his phonemes tomorrow so that he can be easily lip-synced.

This concludes the model assets I have to build, though. The rest of it is all UX stuff for the FuckBuddy app that the series is focused around. It gets featured a lot more in this episode, now that it's been properly introduced in the last.

I'm not looking forward to the fact I need to buy After Effects and experiment with doing motion tracking for green-screen inserts, though. There are some animated UX elements in this episode that are just too complex to be done directly in the Source engine - which is a first for me. I always try to do everything in-engine if I can - even in the hologram projections in the first episode were done entirely in SFM, just using some clever compositing and post-processing to sell the final effect.

I suspect the last few days of May will be spent with me just practicing with Mocha (the motion tracking tool After Effects uses) and nailing down the post-processing to get the animated UX applied to the phone screen in SFM.

That's all for now! Until next week!