Progress Report - October 4, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I, uhh, think I forgot to make a Progress Report last week. Oops.

Not too much to report on that front, anyways, though. Milly Stern, my voice for Gaige, ended up being out sick with her family for most of last week, only now recovering to the point where she's comfortable recording. Hopefully this week will see the Gaige audio done and sent in my way.

I was hoping to have the Gaige video done and ready for posting by the end of this week, but that's obviously not going to happen given that delay. So far my plans to get my release schedule back on task isn't going great. But we'll get there eventually.

I've been using the time waiting for the Gaige audio to make progress on the Claire/Jill video, as well as research the technical issues the Frozen video was having. Last progress report I noted that nearly an hour's worth of audio had come in for Claire/Jill. Since then, I've managed to get (mostly) all of it processed, and during the last Saturday stream, we ended up installing the first 5 minutes of audio.

Just earlier today I posted a tweet for those first five minutes. You can click here to watch the 5 minutes of voiced Claire/Jill. It's still heavily work-in-progress of course.

On the Frozen front, you may or may not recall that the project was running into problems with glacial render times, with projections of upwards of 60 days to render at 4K. I spent a day or two researching the problems, and another day or so working to resolve them.

The core of the problem was lights - there were just so damn many of them, over 30 in total. The most important issue was the fact there were 16 shadow-casting lights, which are extremely intensive on render times, with each doubling of shadow-casting lights (from 2 to 4, from 4 to 8, from 8 to 16) nearly quadrupling render times. What's more, getting those 16 shadow-casting lights in the first place required editing the Source Filmmaker's binaries, a task which apparently my old secondary computer I use for rendering was simply not up to - it simply couldn't load the project file, to assist with rendering.

I have since revised the lighting, revising the total count from 30 lights down to 12, and importantly the shadowed lights from 16 down to 3. This effectively halved the rendering time, and with the ability to bring in my rendering machine to assist, it gets the projected render times for 2160p down from 60+ days to anywhere between 14 and 24 days. Still a long render time, to be sure, but 2 weeks is much more bearable than 2 months.

Plus, with the shadowed lights now within the standard SFM-operating parameters, I could potentially get a third machine to bring into the fold. As my project runtimes quickly approach the average of being 20+ minutes in runtime (Frozen is already 20 minutes and not yet finished, Claire/Jill is 22 minutes, Overbreed Ep1 is 15 minutes and not even close to finished, Parawhores is already 5 minutes and will likely clock in over 20, Blue Star Episode 4 I expect to be over 20 minutes...), all rendered at crisp 2160p, the fact of the matter is I've got a lot of rendering in my future.

And so I am considering buying a third computer to help out with rendering, once one of these projects is ready for rendering. Probably Claire/Jill, though we'll have to see what the final render-time projections for that is before I make the decision on whether or not to pull that trigger.

As a final note, the last Progress Report noted that my time will be split between Overbreed and Claire/Jill. Since then, I've had a long think on it. Since Claire/Jill is now in the penultimate stage of production (that being audio installation; and the ultimate stage being the detail animations to make everything polished), and is a feature film in itself at 22 minutes, I think I am going to go full tilt into getting that video done.

Gaige obviously takes priority when it becomes available for me to work on, but until I get the audio back, there's not much more progress I can make on that. And so, I am going to be working on finishing up the Claire/Jill video and get that released.

Depending on how things go, I may end up getting the Frozen video into a similar state as well, while working on Claire/Jill. We'll have to cross that bridge when we get to it.

But for certain, I am not going to work on other videos beyond Claire/Jill and Frozen (and Gaige, obviously) before getting Overbreed Episode 1 done. If Parawhores also manages to get itself at the stage it needs audio process and installation before Overbreed Episode 1 is done, then Parawhores will be done entirely on-stream. Otherwise I can just keep falling endlessly down a rabbit-hole of working on these on-stream projects, and never find time to do my actual main project.

I don't think we'll get to a point where they all start overlapping, though. I managed to get a quarter of Claire/Jill lipsynced in a stream plus a day, which is honestly a pretty breakneck speed. I suspect it'll only take me maybe 2 weeks to get all of the lip-sync done, and then another week or so to get the detail animation done.

I don't see us getting the Frozen project done and voiced in 3 streams. We'll make good progress, to be sure, but I just don't see us making that much progress.

So, that's where we are right now. Gaige is in the pipe, Claire/Jill is in the shop, Frozen is on the assembly line. Lots of good eating in the coming weeks! I hope you all are working up an appetite!

Until next week, everyone!