Monthly Update: March 2021
Well hello there! It’s been a while. So much so that I never really did a proper February update. In all fairness, I had just dropped a new episode at the top of the month, so there really wasn’t much to talk about. But now, oh boy, there’s so much to discuss!
Well not really. Truth be told things are progressing at a steady, albeit slow, pace. I haven’t really animated a shot in a couple of weeks. Having animated every day of every weekend for over a year, I decided it would be a good time to take a brief break and work on exploring some of the other aspects of the Forlorniverse. Without going into too much detail, I got the bug in the last month to do some writing. For the duration of this whole project, I have had all the information about the world, its characters, and its various goings ons either in my head or written down in various documents. I decided it would be a good time to finally combine all of that stuff into one master world bible. And so, I’ve spent the last couple of weekends assembling and polish this now rather sizeable document, and I feel I’ve reached a good point with it for the time being. I’d love to post some bits of lore some time, but I have to write it out with proper prose before I’d be willing to do that. Hopefully one day.
In addition to that house keeping, I decided to take another look at the models and see if I couldn’t do a bit of polish on various aspects. Never content, if something I release isn’t the best thing I can make at that moment, then it’s gonna bother me. Since Part V is the episode where Kaelis’s face is finally front and center, I’m currently in the process of making sure she looks the best she can look. This comes in a variety of aspects. First, I’m doing a facial polish, with the help of my wife (who is a Disney artist and knows appealing design). While the face is mostly there, it needs like and extra 5-10% push. There’s a balance to be struck to making Kaelis look more feminine, without her looking too “sexy”, which I really want to avoid. This also includes giving her a haircut, and redesigning that look slightly. The hair was designed with a bit of stylization in mind, but I may try and ground it a bit more. Shortening the length of her hair also saves me the trouble of having to animate and/or sim any follow through for the longer strands. I also had some ideas of giving her some more distinct features, and I plan of maybe repainting her textures for good measure. Lastly we’re updating her facial rig to make it easier to work with. And who knows, maybe when we finish all this we’ll go back to the old rig/ model and decide it was fine all along, which can happen. Either way, I’ll show our progress when I have something to show.
Aside from a few other quick things, I should be back to animating very shortly, maybe even by the time I post this update. I just want this series to be the best it can be, so if it means pausing things to polish, then that’s what I gotta do. But animation is about halfway done for Part V at this moment, so hopefully the remainder can be hammered into shape fairly quickly. I’ll keep ya posted. In the mean time, take it easy!
Alex
