Random Dungeons & Dragons bullshittery - Update #9

Good evening Patrons. Sorry for the delays between the updates. This particular project is one hell of a grindstone. Good lord. Remind me never to do anything this complicated again. Before I inevitably end up doing something like this again...

TL;DR It's about 13 weeks in and it's 75% complete. I was able to reached 74.74% before starting the QA phase yesterday, with 82% being the mark from which it's all QA from there.

Meaning there's about 7.26% left. The rest is edited.

I've entered the quality assurance phase because those artists need more time and I can meet them as I go. Folding the editing of those missing elements into the QA effort. This stuff needs to get done.

We're definitely in the end game now though.

I'm not sure how many of the 152 scenes still need something. But for the vast majority of them, it's just QA now. All the elements are in there, even if they're not quite polished.

What does that actually look like for me?

Well (almost) each scene has been edited according to my original requirements of the previs. QA is going to be something that no doubt throws numerous curveballs, but most commonly:

• Mouth phonemes are often not quite perfect and need adjusting.

• Weapons are often in inconsistent hands.

• Earlier animations needs to be tweaked for some of the first done stuff was a bit crude. Anchor points in the wrong places, etc. My gained experience helps a lot now.

• Shadows need to be placed into the scene if the ground is visible.

• Upgraded things like hands or better brows.

As I'm going through the main timeline, I'm taking a moment to render the scenes in .mp4 form. Disabling the After Effects compositions and telling Premiere to just render that. Shown here on last VR.

Generally it's faster. For an earlier test render for this took 10 whole hours before when trying to do all 152 After Effects files.

I should really turn these into lossess .avi files eventually. But that should be pretty effortless. It'll just be a case of dragging and dropping them into the render queue. For now I'm just trying to get the QA sorted.

One thing to note is that I might have found a potential hand-drawn animator for a segment that's stumped me a bit. A segment I'm calling the "G25 seven". Seven scenes that are mostly edited, but have an obviously missing character - Lashonda - Cyanide's rogue.

There's a part in the bullshittery where the music swells and Cyanide does something heroic.

I've planned ahead during his character design to make sure he has a blue ribbon in his hair, which flies off at this moment. Signalling the change in style. For it's at that point that I'd like to make him hand-drawn.

I've been put in touch with a professional animator with training in that style. She's going to do a test commission this weekend.

Hopefully it's a good fit. And then I can leave the G25 seven in her hands. Fingers crossed.

The remaining time to completion is too early to tell. But I'm going to chop through the quality assurance scene by scene. Inching closer and closer to the finish line. At which point I'll have a better idea. Hopefully there won't be any missing elements with their fingers around the doorframe.

Also I had a rather fun idea for the next video - a behind the scenes retrospective on this extremely unique bullshittery. Done in a comedic fashion.

Basically a retrospective video essay in the exact same style as Lazy Purple's SFM video. Talking about all of the creative decisions that went wrong, everything that went right. All the silly little bugs and glitches that cropped up. And how my best laid plans faced reality when confronted with Adobe After Efffects.

I reckon I could make a funny video about making this funny video. It's worth thinking about, if you'd be interested in that.

Right now, QA phase begins.