Progress Report - November 29, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

As I eluded to last week, I am fully back on the wagon of working on the pending projects. I made a big blog post about those projects and the schedule therein a few days ago. If you haven't read that, and are curious about the state of projects, then it might be worth a look over.

Similarly, the November comic I've been working on is finishing up. Only a few more days to go. That'll free up a lot of time. You can check that out so far here, with new pages being posted to my Twitter every day of November. Of which there's only two left now, but, you know, whatever.

And finally, the last secondary thing that has been taking up my attention these past few weeks is putting together a myriad of Witcher 3 outfits, for the Frozen project. The men are supposed to be peasants - the project is titled Peasantsday, after all! - and so I figured what better source for peasant outfits than Witcher 3.

This has been a colossal project that's been taking me several weeks. And I'm still not done yet. But here is a quick gif showing everything done so far.

The major time-sink now is the fact I have to convert all of the textures from the two-channel color-masks that Witcher uses to the one-channel color-mask that Source uses. In a nutshell, this means that Witcher can color two parts of the texture arbitrarily, but Source can only color one. Converting them means I have to choose what parts to be fixed-color and what parts to be manually colored. It's not difficult to do for any given texture, but it is exhausting with the sheer amount of textures I have to process.

So far, I've gotten all 23 shirts done, 7 of the 15 pants done, and 0 of the 23 sleeves done. Yeah, if you noticed most of those shirts are sleeveless, that's because the sleeves are a separate mesh that can also be mixed and matched. There's also 10 different shoes to choose from, but those don't need to be retextured like everything else.

In total, there's going to be a metric fuck-ton of variation available for the peasants in the Frozen project, before you even start considering outfit coloration. Which is a good thing, cuz there's a metric fuck-ton of peasants. My last count had over 60 unique men in the project, and it'll only grow as the project continues its march toward completion.

Enough with all of the side-projects, though!

This past week, my primary focus has been on Claire/Jill. Which, as you can tell from this post's image, does actually have a formal name - and now a draft poster! It's actually had the formal name of Refuge for months now, but I just internally call it Claire/Jill. This poster is still pending approval from DrJavi, whose been the brain behind the idea, but his schedule is busy and he hasn't had a chance to review it yet. So hopefully he doesn't mind me sharing this early draft.

My lip-syncing efforts are almost done now! I've been averaging about 4 minutes of lip-syncing a day (for one character), which for a 22-minute video with two characters to lip-sync, means about 44 minutes total of lip-syncing.

As of right now, I've gotten the first 3 project files fully lip-synced, and yesterday saw me finish all of Claire's lip-sync in file 4. That leaves only Jill to be lip-synced in file 4, which is 512 seconds long - or about 8.5 minutes.

At the average rate of 4 minutes a day, I am hoping to have all of Jill's lip-sync in file 4 done within two work days. Normally, Tuesday is only a half-day as I do my out-and-about chores like shopping, but seeing as my computer is currently telling me it's about to fucking dump snow today, I will probably be spending the day in today, so it'll end up being a full work day.

Which means that, if all goes well, I should have Claire/Jill fully lip-synced by the end of Friday! End of Sunday at the very latest.

And then, once the lip sync is fully done, I will be firing it off to my sound designer to start working his magic, as I work through and polish and finalize all of the animation. That's going to be a lumpy effort, as the lewd sequences need a lot less work than the narrative sequences. By their nature, the lewd sequences are already fully in motion - the narrative sequences are blocked out, with stone-still characters and moving mouths. The lewd sequences only need their motions refined, things like posed fingers and head motions; the narrative sequences need their motions built, and then refined.

Technically speaking, I could have sent everything off to my sound designer before the lip-sync. But I didn't know how long the lip-sync was going to take, and I sort of wanted to use it as a litmus test to see the scale of how long working on this project will take.

At 22 minutes, my sound designer is going to have his hands full. It took him a near month longer than we anticipated for him to do the 8-minute Gaige video, and he has every plan to compose an original soundtrack for Claire/Jill ala the 7-minute Overbreed Episode 0 video.

So honestly, I probably would have been fine sending it off before lip-sync. But, that's not what happened.

Where things go from here, we'll have to see how the cards fall. If I end up finishing the animation before he finishes the audio, then so be it. It's not like I don't have other projects I can work on.

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