Progress Report - January 29, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

So it turns out that I had slightly jumped the gun when writing last week's Progress Report. I thought the audio that Milly had sent in was all of her audio, when it was in fact only her non-dub audio.

I'm not quite sure what the hold-up is, but as of writing, I have yet to receive her dub audio. It was originally supposed to come in "later that day" last Monday, then Friday, and then now Monday. And, well, here we are.

I don't say any of this to throw shade or lay blame, but just as a transparent admission. I know that Milly has a busy day-to-day life and that voicing lewd videos is low down on her list of priorities, below her traditional nine-to-five, recording audiobooks, and caring for her family. So when I say I don't know what's causing the delay, it's that I don't know what specifically is causing it. I've plenty other things to work on whilst I wait for her.

The only real hang-up it causes is I had to send my sound designer an incomplete package to work with, since he can't really mix Milly's dub audio if he doesn't have Milly's dub audio. But it is what it is.

I've been spending this week mostly working on what I mentioned was the plan last Monday: processing and installing Milly's audio, lipsyncing everything, resynchronizing the audio as best I can and sending it off to my sound designer, and working on finalizing animation.

Preparing the sound solution for my sound designer was complicated by the lack of Milly's audio, as well as just spinning my wheels a bit deciding on what the best solution was. At first we were going to try a solution where he designs around the video transitions, but after some experimenting, I ultimately decided against that, reverting all the work I had done to facilitate that to instead provide him all of the raw footage to edit, with a separate video for him to mix for non-diegetic sound. It was a bit of a clunky day, but we got it figured out in the end.

For this week's progress report, I decided to share the raw cut of this particular sequence. It hasn't been mixed yet, which is why the voices are on the quiet side and there are no sounds other than the raw vocal performances.

You can click here to check out the 90-second WIP. 

What you see here is the gesticulation pass, where I have major head, body, and hand motion fitting the delivery of the voice lines. The detail pass, which adds all the little nuances to body motion, and the expression pass have yet to be done.

My goal for this week is to get the rest of the gesticulation passes done (there are two more to be done, though this is the largest of the three), and then move on to the expression and detail passes. I should also finally actually build the screen assets that Artemis and Medusa are commenting on in this sequence sometime this week.

I am also really hoping that Milly will get her dub audio in soon. I suspect that I will likely run out of things to do before the week's end otherwise.

We're not going to hit the February 2 mark, but we're going to get close. Doing some rough napkin math, I am expecting the remaining gesticulation passes to take a full day, the expression pass to take a full day, and the non-dub detail pass to take a full day, for 3 days. I'm expecting 3 additional days for lip-syncing the dub sequences (there are 3 unique sex scenes in the video, so I'm assuming 1 day per scene), bringing us up to 6 days.

This 90-second WIP took 3 hours to render, at full quality 720p. The full video is 8 minutes in length, and the final resolution will be 2160p, so we can extrapolate a final render time using the following equation: (480 seconds full video / 90 seconds wip) * (2160p / 720p) * 3 hours => (480 / 90) * (3) * 3 = 27 hours. Split that across both my rendering machines to speed it up a fair bit, but then consider I will likely want to use my main computer during the day to actually do stuff to slow it back down again, and let's just assume it's going to take effectively 2 days to render.

Then throw in a day to finish the editing, and all of that already puts us at 9 days. And this is all assuming Milly will be able to get her dub audio to me, I will be able to install it into the final working mix, and my sound designer will be able to get all the work done before me.

So, assuming my rough estimates are perfectly accurate and there are absolutely zero delays or technical complications, that'd put us at February 7th at the earliest.

For now, I'm going to eyeball a February 9th release, one week after the hopeful February 2nd release. Again and as always, don't hold me to that number, that's just my best guess judging from where we are and where we've yet to go.

And as always, I will keep you all up to date. Much like I said last week that I would be confident if we'll hit the February 2nd mark by today this Monday (we won't), I will be confident if we'll hit the February 9th mark by February 5th next Monday.

I'm feeling pretty good about this project as a whole. Innie as always is fantastic reprising her sassy Samus role, and I am absolutely tickled pink at Milly's performance as Medusa. I am very excited to hear how her dub performance will turn out.

Above all else though, I won't lie when I say I am just excited to return to working on Overbreed, once this video is out. I've been sneaking a little bit of work on it over the past few weeks and, yeah, I'm just chomping at the bit to get to focus on it full-time again. I've been away too long.

At any rate, that's all for now.