Progress Report - October 10, 2021 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for not making this progress report as regularly scheduled, on Friday. A combination of time getting away from me and trying to slowly pull back how late I've been going to bed meant I didn't have the time.

It has been a productive week, though! Lots of stuff moving along in the pipeline.

I've gotten the three Witcher ladies built onto their new bodies. As I think I've mentioned before (certainly mentioned this on Twitter), I have elected to more or less let my imagination take the reins when it comes to building them. The Witcher 3 all gives them more or less the same physique, following and disregarding the books' descriptions of the characters in arbitrary fashions.

So, instead, I decided to follow a combination of the book descriptions and my own interpretations of the characters, for the sake of giving them more varied and interesting bodies. As I said in the Tweet linked above, everyone being the same height (and looking more or less the same) is boring.

Yennefer is described in the books as being notably short, even wearing high boots, so I ended up pegging her around 5'3 (1.6m). She is described as being slim of figure, while maintain curves and having a notable bosom. Similarly, Ciri is described as being tall, lanky, and awkward. Toward that end, I put her right around 5'11 (1.8m), and leggy. I also gave her a lean, muscular body, to better reflect the idea that she is a strong, sword-swinging, monster-mauling Witcher. And then finally Triss has surprisingly little information about her physique, so I decided to give her a decidedly average height and build, while taking some cues from Witcher 3 (and some derisive comments I've seen about her in-game appearance) and giving her a rather meaty, voluptuous physique.

Altogether these three ladies took a bit longer than usual for me, through a combination of the fact they've just been side-projects I've tinkered on a bit in the mornings before getting on with the day, and the fact that I decided to give all three of them higher-poly faces. Properly converting their faces from triangles to quads (the subdivision is much cleaner with quads than it is with triangles) requires a fair bit of manual labor, and then there is the issue of the faces becoming too high-poly for Source, and requiring even more manual labor to get them down to a point where the models can be properly compiled into Source. You'll also notice all their mouths are slightly open - that, too, is a technical consequence of the high-poly efforts, so I can make sure to get the insides of their lips and mouths. And to stop the rigging from fucking up and welding their mouths shut, as it was wont to do.

Beyond the Witcher ladies, the OLCs are coming together nicely. The Elizabeth video has had its audio fully processed and sound designed, meaning all I need to do is lip-sync the dialogue and finish the animation and scene. With any luck, by this time next week, it will be ready to be released! The Femshep video appears to be the next on the block, with its dub audio fully recorded and pieced together, and currently in the shop with my sound designer to work his magic on. The Rebecca video is probably next, with a voice cued up and waiting to recover from a cold before recording.

I will likely be spending tomorrow and possibly Tuesday polishing up the Elizabeth video, and then returning the rest of my efforts to Overbreed.

And speaking of Overbreed, the tour-de-force, what you are all probably really here for, I've got a new WIP video together for you all! It's a whopping 2 minutes this time around, and as always, is attached at the bottom of this post for your downloading and viewing pleasure.

We're still woefully off-course in terms of the screenplay, as a consequence of the technical problems with the planned pose. But, I am hoping that all of the teasing and anticipation that I am putting in its place will be appreciated and warmly received, in building up the pacing. I am hoping that by next week, we'll be back on schedule.

With this WIP complete, Sequence C of Overbreed is now just shy of 6 minutes of animated runtime. And we've barely even got started. And there's still two other sequences to build. I've said it before, and I will surely say it again, but Overbreed Episode 1 will be one hell of a whopper.

That's all I have for now! I hope you all enjoy!