Monthly Update: August 2020
It’s been quite a month. Forlorn - Part II is now, officially done! Animation, lighting, and rendering was completed last week, and sound design was wrapped up shortly afterward. I still have yet to hand off the episode to the composer, but that, and the final mix, are the last steps before it’s ready for release!
However, as I mentioned in a previous post, I plan on sitting on this episode for at least another month. Part III hasn’t even started the animation phase yet, and I don’t anticipate getting to that point for at least another month or so. The pattern I’ve gotten into is that for animation, sound design, and other head down, nose to the grindstone type work, I save for the weekends, whereas every other weekday I set aside to do something lighter. So, in this instance I’m revising a character, building a new character, and building a new environment. I was able to make some significant progress on all 3 of those tasks in the last month, but I still have a ways to go before they’re all finished. I still have to:
Paint the revised textures on one character
Rig the second character
Finish Modeling the new environment
Texture and add Unreal assets to the environment
Create the basic light set up for the environment
And adjust the layout of the scene to fit in with the final set
And I need to do all that before I can start animating. It’s still a lot of work, but not a significant amount. I also had a bunch of new ideas about ways to modify the overall look of the next environment, so I’ll have to run some experiments as well. Part II is definitely the odd episode out, as I anticipate each episode taking considerably longer than this one from now on. That being said, this is probably the biggest asset break I’ll need to take for a while, as aside from one last environment in Part IV, I won’t have to make anything new until Part VII, and that will be probably less complicated than what I’m doing right now. As the assets are finished, I was thinking it’d be fun to do some spotlights on them, highlight some techniques and things like that. I was also thinking once this whole thing is over I’d like to produce a short making of video that illustrates a shot from beginning to end, mostly so I can finally properly explain to my family exactly what it is I do with my life.
As I said, I anticipate this next month being pretty asset heavy. I doubt I’ll get to animation before the release of Part II. But that will be here sooner than I know it.
