Progress Report - September 24, 2020 (Patreon)

Hey all!

Liziverse is making great progress! It’s not quite where I wanted it to be, but I’m overall not too bothered by it—after all, I am pointedly not giving myself any deadlines for these projects anymore.  That being said, the handful of hours that ultimately bore no fruit were still invaluable—testing the limits of what all my motion-capture rig is good for and what all still needs to be keyed by hand, and experimenting with ways to accelerate the animation workflow and finding what all doesn’t work.

On the subject of motion-capture, I can confirm the following for my setup: it is fantastic for idle standing animations. And that’s about it. Sitting animations just… don’t really work well. And hilariously, outside of Casual Elizabeth in the Office sequence, literally all of the idle animation in the project involves people sitting down. Of course, this isn’t mere coincidence – I put together this project knowing I’d have to hand-key everything, and idle standing animations are notoriously difficult for me to get looking decent by hand. And so to avoid that problem, I wrote the project such that everyone is sitting down whenever possible.

Hilariously, that time-saver now comes back to bite me in the ass, because hand-keying sitting animations is actually slower than motion-capturing standing animations. But of course, I had no intentions of attempting motion-capture for this project at the time. Live and learn!

The astute of you may have picked up the implications here, that I have successfully motion-captured the standing idle animations for Liziverse. And the particularly deductive of you might have even come to the conclusion that I have used a video as this image’s preview! In fact, you can even watch it with sound by clicking here. This is a low-quality export straight out of SFM—it’s not quite ready for final 4K render (no camera animation, lighting needs some tuning, little things like that)—without any sound design (just raw dialogue audio). So it’s not indicative of the overall experience, but the animations themselves are final.

I picked this sequence in particular to showcase because it’s a good demonstration of the different animation techniques used: BAS Elizabeth is entirely hand-keyed; Casual Elizabeth’s body is entirely motion-captured; and Casual Elizabeth’s hands are motion-capture-based with manual keying to tweak the motions (mostly because I didn’t use any props for the capture, and so the raw capture has the folder going straight through the computer monitor… several times). This sequence demonstrates how they all work unison—whether or not they work well, I leave to your discretion.

With that being said, and as alluded to earlier, the Office sequence of Liziverse Episode 1 is entirely finished, sans camera animation and final light tweaking. I plan to start its 4K render over the next few evenings while I sleep.

All that’s left are the Private Room sequences of the video. I expect them to be quicker to process, because they’re not as emotionally nuanced as this Office sequence is. I am hoping to be finished with them entirely by this time next week. If next week comes to pass and I am not, then it is what it is—but that is my aspiration.

Beyond Liziverse, I’ve also been slowly working on Rachel’s new outfit for the upcoming Chaos project. You can see images of that over on my Twitter.

That’s all I’ve got for you for now! Until next time, everyone!