Progress Report - March 22, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everybody!

My goal for this week was to get the climb-up animation of Overbreed done. I managed to pull it off, but barely in time - I got it done earlier today. I originally planned to get it done earlier in the week, but circumstances conspired such that it didn't happen.

The other week, I postulated that I lose a lot of time and don't even know where it goes. This week, I paid more attention to my time, and I think I figured out where at least a good chunk of it goes: "Quick" asides that end up being anything but quick.

Enter, Exhibit A:

This was a "15-minute shitpost idea" that ended up taking over 6 hours to put together. There was a lot of asset production involved - the Das Kapital book, Honoka's easel, Marie's runny-makeup, Marie's screen texture, and the MacBook Pro. The MacBook itself took around two hours, because the model I found came with no materials, so I had to set it all up myself. And then, because I am complete fucking masochist, I wrote a tool to automate rigging each and every key on the keyboard to be individually depressable. 

The end result of 6 hours of work for a decidedly 6/10 shitpost. I decided it wasn't good enough to post on Twitter, but that doesn't change the fact it took an entire day to put together.

Now enter, Exhibit B:

A simple enough image. A pose with an overlay, a timecode, and some grain. Would you believe me if I said I spent nearly 90 minutes on the VFX of this shot?

This one is chalked up to the fact that Davinci Resolve has some extremely unintuitive UX design, and its developer makes some baffling decisions. The first problem was the timecode itself. Adding a timecode to Davinci Resolve isn't too difficult - you add a Text+ node, right-click the Text field, and choose Timecode.

What's that? You want to change the timecode to use an arbitrary starting point, rather than the start of your video clip?

Haha, oh boy, are you in for a ride, then.

If you're reading this and you happen to use Davinci Resolve, allow me to spare you 45 minutes of googling and bashing your head against the wall: after you've set the Text+ to use Timecode, go to Fusion; along the top of the Inspector, choose Modifiers. Double-click on the "Time Code on Template" (do NOT click the switch! Double-click the text!). This will pop up the controls for the Timecode, where you can change what all is displayed, as well as the starting second and framerate.

On the subject of Text+, here's another 15 minutes of headache saved: if you want to add a dropshadow and a stroke to the text, go to the "Shading" tab of the Text+ in Fusion, and then use the drop-down for "Select Element" to choose a different element. Element 1 is the fill, Element 2 is the stroke, Element 3 is the dropshadow. Select the relevant element, choose Enabled, and then adjust as you see fit.

And then for the final 30-minute headache Davinci gave me for this ludicrously simple image: BlackMagic, the creators of Davinci Resolve, decided to make adding grain to an image be a premium-only feature. That's right, if you want to make your image look worse, you have to pay $300!

The "official" solution to this problem is to go download some stock footage of noise, and comp it into your project. Of course, the masochist that I am, I decided to make my own footage of noise, and so used Photoshop to generate 6 frames of 4K multicolor noise, and then import it as an image sequence into Davinci Resolve.

But, of course, that's only a quarter-second of footage at 24fps. A fifth of a second at 30fps. Duplicating it a thousand million times to cover the length of your footage isn't very scalable. Surely there must be a way to loop the noise footage?

Good luck googling that one, fucko. Let me save you that headache as well:

In the Edit mode, go to Effects, add a blank Fusion Composition. Set it to the length you want, then open it in Fusion. Open up the Media Pool in the top-left corner, and drag in the video clip you want to loop (like the 6-frame noise image sequence). The newly-created MediaIn1 should be selected - and at the bottom of the Inspector menu, there is a "Loop" checkbox. Check that. Now link your MediaIn1 to the existing MediaOut1. That's it.

You won't believe how many threads I had to read to find that tidbit. Another 15 minutes of my life wasted.

So, my friends, that is how a drop-dead-simple VFX edit of an image ends up taking 90 minutes. And, with Exhibit A, that is how a 15-minute shitpost ends up taking 6 hours.

And altogether, I think these efforts-turned-time-sink explain a good portion of where my time goes. And that's not even taking into account friends that want to play 6+ hours of Civilization 6 nearly every fucking day of the week.

Anyways, here's my super creative solution to the problem of Mercy's skirt blocking the good view. If you recall, many weeks (months?) ago, I showed off a digital-construction VFX for Mercy's cock. Since I've already established that tech exists in Overbreed, I decided to use it to deconstruct Mercy's skirt.

Nanomachines, son!

The full WIP is attached. I made sure it's the right one this time. There isn't much. Between the Patreon post image and this image, you've seen pretty much all I've gotten done this week on Overbreed.

Nevertheless, I am quite pleased with it all. I spent a long time pondering how to get Mercy onto that high examination table, before deciding to just #yolo and see if she could Riker Maneuver it. Amazingly, Overwatch characters' legs are so hilariously long that she could actually pull it off. One of the few times where whacky character proportions actually worked in my favor. Usually it works against me - such as the entire facefuck detour, caused entirely by the legs being too long.

That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!