Part V Release
It’s been about a week since the release of Part V, and that means it’s time to post about my experience with the roll out, as is tradition. Overall I was pretty pleased with how everything turned out. In terms of the social media response, it blew away my expectations in terms the amount of engagement I got. I received hundreds of wonderful and supportive comments, and my posts were among the top posts for the entire month in terms of upvotes. What really surprised me, though, is that I got a lot of comments from fellow animators whom I’ve met only recently that were already familiar with my work. That’s very exciting, to find that my stuff is circulating, as limited as it may be.
For this episode I also got a good amount of constructive feedback, strangely entirely focused in the Unreal Engine subreddit. It’s interesting how different communities operate. Anyway, I got two very strong notes: adjust the mix to give the impacts more oomph, and that Asier’s sword doesn’t look heavy enough. For the sound mix, that’s already been addressed. A new sound mix was made almost immediately, and the video with the improved mix was updated on Vimeo. The next change requires a bit more work, but I plan on implementing it in the coming weeks. Once of the things I did for the sword fight was study a lot of Montante fencing, and I loved how fast these fighters are able to move with these giant swords. So I incorporated their styles into the animation, but what I didn’t do is adjust the sword design to match that style. I gave Asier this absurdly thick great sword mostly as a function of dramatic design, but unfortunately that bothered just enough people that I decided it would be best to update the look slightly. So, I plan on going back into Part IV and V and adjusting the sword design and some animation to match more closely to a Montante style sword, which is thinner in appearance. This should make the animation read better, overall, and I’m always looking to make things the best I can make them.
On the whole I’m very happy with the reception to Part V. Part VI is almost finished with animation, and I hope to make it my best episode yet. Until then, thank you all for tuning in!
