Space Engineers bullshittery - Update #7

Good evening everybody. Sorry I'm afraid that I've slipped the delivery date on the video. It was meant to be today. But it appears that things are taking a bit longer than anticipated.

For those unfamiliar with the previous posts, I'm currently working on Space Engineers bullshittery with a total runtime of about 22 minutes when finished. Early on I decided to work on it in two distinct chunks:

• Part 2 was finished 11 days ago and is available here - https://youtu.be/8KTojndpHQU

• Part 1 has about 50 seconds remaining out of 10 minutes for its phase 1 editing. Before it enters phase 2 refinement/rework/quality assurance.

• It'll likely be finished in a week or so. At which point I'll stitch the two halves together and start making final checks. Then it should be ready for you.

On part 1, things have been going well. Slowly but surely as always.

Just like part 2, it was all cut together at the very start so all of the individual scenes were in place and watchable. It has simply been a case of importing those scenes into After Effects and then animating them.

Unlike part 2 however, part 1 is far more traditional bullshittery. Not taking place on any particular planet in the game. Consisting of individual highlights from many different Space Engineers games, cut together in a form that feels smooth.

As a result, moments of banter provide opportunities for animated cut aways. So there's more of that in part 1 than in part 2. Segments where the guys are all building and quietly making situational comedy. And I've commissioned some artists to come in with some work.

Most of which I still need to add during phase 2 refinements.

It's also worth noting that I'm totally up to my usual tricks. For there have been many moments in part 1 where the highlight took place during gameplay that was a little too...visually busy.

So just like in Alyx, I'm being sneaky again and swapping out some background visuals here and there.

For example there's this shot where Lulu was making just a little bit too much motion in the top left of the frame. To the point that the viewer is probably going to ignore the text animation.

So I quickly dived into a similar iteration of that ship and re-recorded 10 seconds of visuals.

Or here, where the guys were being funny as I scurry around the guts of the Meridian (my personal ship). When a slow external shot would be much more appropriate.

Or here, where there are sub alerts, Lulu cam, tutorial text AND building blocks rotating in the frame. When a slow stable pan would have been easier to view.

Worry not, as this process is really fast in Space Engineers specifically. As Creative Mode lets you teleport to the precise biomes. And saved blueprints let you restore the ships in question. I'm not sinking a ton of time into this sort of thing

It's mainly just worth bringing up in a Patreon post as it's much more creative than simple keyframing. Which is always the same story. Put in Null Objects and move them around to follow stuff.

That really is my job in a nutshell isn't it :) I move Null objects around a Composition.

Speaking of which, there's a TON of those. The video as a whole consists of about 144 compositions. Therefore over 450GB of lossless .avi files already waiting to be rendered.

I shall try to work it through phase 2 refinements as quickly as I can. Sorry for the delay.